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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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Nietzsche suggests that our reasoning can distort the truth we perceive through our senses.

In this quote, Friedrich Nietzsche posits that while our senses accurately perceive the world as it changes, our rational minds often misinterpret these sensory experiences. Reason can lead us to draw incorrect conclusions from the evidence our senses provide, highlighting a tension between what we perceive and what we think we know.

Themes

ReasonSensesTruthPerceptionChange

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality.

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Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness β€” as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne β€” and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
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The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
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Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.
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