“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth…. Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth….…" by Friedrich Nietzsche?
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Friedrich Nietzsche 655
German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and cl… 1844–1900

Related quotes

Charles Dodgson (archdeacon) photo

“His reverence for sacred things was so great that he was never known to relate a story which included a jest upon words from the Bible.”

Charles Dodgson (archdeacon) (1800–1868) Anglican clergyman, scholar

Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898) p. 8
About

Jacob Bronowski photo
Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Nicholas of Cusa photo

“All we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach.”

De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) (1440)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

“Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited — dimly, briefly — by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.
Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see — not yourself — but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...

Roger Wolcott Sperry photo

“One of the more important things to come out of the split-brain work, as an indirect spin-off, is a revised concept of the nature of consciousness and its fundamental relation to brain processing.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Nobel lecture (1981)
Context: One of the more important things to come out of the split-brain work, as an indirect spin-off, is a revised concept of the nature of consciousness and its fundamental relation to brain processing. The key development here is a switch from prior non-causal, parallelist views to a new causal, or "interactionist" interpretation that ascribes to inner experience an integral causal control role in brain function and behavior. In effect, and without resorting to dualist views, the mental forces and properties of the conscious mind are restored to the brain of objective science from which they had long been excluded on materialist-behaviorist principles.

Related topics