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. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher, classical scholar, critic of culture. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, pp. 880-881, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin, de Gruyter (1980); Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, p. 84, trans. and ed. by Daniel Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Humanities Press (1979). "On Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense," section 1 (1873).
An unpublished and unfinished essay that Nietzsche intended to incorporate into his Philosophers' Book project.
