72 definitions
The book's index
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
47 concepts · 72 definitions
- abstraction2
- anthropomorphism1
- appearance1
- art1
- consciousness1
- culture1
- curiosity1
- deception2
- dissimulation1
- dream2
- forgetfulness1
- honesty1
- ignorance1
- imagination1
- intellect5
- intuition3
- knowing2
- knowledge1
- language3
- law of nature1
- leaf1
- liar1
- man3
- metaphor3
- myth1
- name1
- nature1
- perception1
- philosopher1
- pride1
- rationality2
- reality1
- regularity1
- science1
- scientist1
- security1
- self-consciousness1
- sense1
- Stoic2
- subject1
- thing-in-itself1
- truth8
- truthfulness1
- vanity1
- waking1
- will to truth1
- word1
Truth (n.) is a movable host of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms which after long usage seem to a people fixed, canonical and binding.
Truth (n.) began as a peace treaty: bored and needy, the herd fixed binding names for things to end the war of all against all.
Truth (n.) is made of illusions we have forgotten are illusions: worn-out metaphors, coins that have lost their embossing and now count only as metal.
Truth (n.) found by reason is finding the thing you hid behind the bush exactly where you hid it.
Intellect (n.) is a master of deception, free only when it deceives without injuring — then it slips its slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia.
Intellect (n.) has no mission beyond human life; when it is over, nothing will have happened.
Intellect (n.) was given to the most unfortunate and ephemeral of beings merely as a device to detain them a minute in existence — without it they would flee life at once.
Intellect (n.) is ordinarily a servant hunting booty for a needy master; liberated, it becomes the master and wipes the look of indigence from its face.
Language (n.) is never a question of truth or adequate expression — otherwise there would not be so many languages.
Language (n.) leaves us like the deaf man staring at Chladni's sand figures, swearing he now knows what 'sound' means.
Language (n.) is legislation: the first binding names for things are also the first laws of truth.
Man (n.) is a genius of construction who piles an infinitely complicated dome of concepts on running water — and so must build it like a spider's web.
Man (n.) outbuilds the bee: the bee builds with wax gathered from nature, man with conceptual material he must first manufacture from himself.
Man (n.) differs from the animals only by his knack for volatilizing perceptual metaphors into a schema — dissolving an image into a concept.
A Metaphor (n.) is the work of the fundamental human drive — to dispense with that drive for an instant would be to dispense with man himself.
A Metaphor (n.) is where language begins: a nerve stimulus leaps into an image, the image into a sound — each time overleaping one sphere into an entirely different one.
A Metaphor (n.) is all we possess of things — trees, colours, snow, flowers — and it corresponds in no way to the original entities.
Intuition (n.) in the intuitive man counts as real only the life disguised as illusion and beauty, and where he wins a culture takes shape in which even the clay jugs seem made for joy, not need.
Intuition (n.) in the intuitive man suffers more often and more intensely, never learns from experience, and keeps falling into the same ditch, irrational in sorrow as in joy.
Intuition (n.) has no word: before it man grows dumb, or speaks only in forbidden metaphors and unheard-of combinations of concepts.
Deception (n.) is not what men hate; they hate only its unpleasant consequences — being harmed by fraud, not being defrauded.
Deception (n.) is something man is invincibly inclined to welcome — he is enchanted with happiness when the actor plays more royally than any real king.
Knowing (n.) was invented by clever beasts on a cooling star — the most arrogant and mendacious minute of world history, but only a minute.
Knowing (n.) is a power so inflating that the most trivial thing in nature swells up like a balloon at its slightest puff.
Abstraction (n.) is what makes hierarchy possible: castes, laws, privileges and boundaries can be built from schemata, never from vivid first impressions.
Abstraction (n.) wards off misfortune but never yields happiness.
A Stoic (n.) seeks nothing but truth and freedom from deception until misfortune comes, and then he performs his masterpiece of deception, a mask of dignified symmetrical features.
A Stoic (n.) when a real storm cloud thunders above him wraps himself in his cloak and walks slowly out from under it.