Youth Is An Unpleasant Period; For Then

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.

Spirit Is The Life That Itself Cuts Into Life: With Its Own Torment It Increases Its Own Knowledge. Did You Already Know That?

Madness Is The Result Not Of Uncertainty But Certainty.

There Is A Great Ladder Of Religious Cruelty, And, Of Its Many Rungs, Three Are The Most Important. People Used To Make Human Sacrifices To Their God, Perhaps Even Sacrificing Those They Loved The Best ... Then, During The Moral Epoch Of Humanity, People Sacrificed The Strongest Instincts They Had, Their 'nature,' To Their God... Finally: What Was Left To Be Sacrificed? ... Didn't People Have To Sacrifice God Himself And Worship Rocks, Stupidity, Gravity, Fate, Or Nothingness Out Of Sheer Cruelty To Themselves?

And If You Are Not A Bird, Then Beware Of Coming To Rest Above An Abyss.