"Truth is a mobile army of metaphors,..." - Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".
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More by Friedrich Nietzsche

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

More on Truth

“Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
“We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.”
— George Orwell

More on Illusion

“We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.”
— Blaise Pascal
“When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”
— Ernest Hemingway