I am Zarathustra the Godless: where shall I find my equal? All those who give themselves their own will and renounce all submission, they are my equals.
Not infrequently, we encounter copies of important human beings; and here, too, as in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.
Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".
There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.
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!
Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.