Selected "contradictions" (paradoxes) of Friedrich Nietzsche

(Lisäys, 18.7)

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space -- how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!
*
What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.
*
Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations -- always darker, emptier, simpler than these.
*
Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.
*
Necessity is not an established fact, but rather an interpretation.
*
There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!
*
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
*
We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.
*
The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more thoroughly you must seduce the senses to accept it.
*
Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.
*
18.7 Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.
*
He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.
*
Great intellects are skeptical.
*
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
*
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.
*
Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say thus it shall be!, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past -- they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.
Their knowing is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is -- will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?
*
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
*
To give style to one's character -- a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.
*
Art raises its head where creeds relax.
*
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
*
Without music, life would be a mistake.
*
Only sick music makes money today.
*
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
*
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
*
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
*
Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?
*
Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.
*
The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.
*
I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.
*
The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding -- in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
*
In Heaven all the interesting people are missing.