"Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life." (Friedrich Nietzsche," The Birth of Tragedy", 1872)
"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries - a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)
"That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard - of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)
"The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", 1873)
"The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch." (Friedrich Nietzsche,"On Truth and Lie in an Nonmoral Sense", 1873)
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding." (Friedrich W Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", 1873)
"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", 1873)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." (Friedrich W Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human: A book for Free Spirits", 1878)
"It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off." (Friedrich W Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits", 1878)
"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values." (Friedrich W Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals", 1887)
"We say it is ‘explanation’ but it is only in ‘description’ that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better we explain just as little as our predecessors." (Friedrich W Nietzsche, "The Joyful Wisdom", 1887)
"In mathematics there is no understanding. In mathematics there are only necessities, laws of existence, invariant relationships. Thus any mathematico-mechanistic outlook must, in the last analysis, waive all understanding. For, we only understand when we know the motives; where there are no motives, all understanding ceases." (Friedrich W Nietzsche) [attributed]
"Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth." (Friedrich W Nietzsche) [attributed]
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