truth?

November 28, 2008

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

 

(On Truth and Lies in a extra-moral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche 1873, translated by Walter Kaufmann and Daniel Breazeale)

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