Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche takes a comforting slogan - "truth is simple" - and turns it into a trap: if you feel relief when an idea arrives neatly packaged, that relief is already a warning sign. The line performs what it argues. It starts with a smooth, aphoristic glide ("All truth is simple...") then snaps into a heckling question that punctures the audience's appetite for clarity. The ellipsis is doing real work here: it mimics the pause where a listener nods along, right before Nietzsche yanks the chair away.

The specific intent is less to defend complexity for its own sake than to indict the moral psychology behind "simple truth". For Nietzsche, simplicity often signals a will to domesticate the world - to force messy, competing perspectives into a single, obedient story that can be preached, sold, or used to rule. That is the "doubly" in "doubly a lie": first, the claim lies about reality (which is tangled, layered, historically contingent); second, it lies about the speaker's motives, disguising a desire for certainty, authority, or comfort as philosophical cleanliness.

Context matters. Nietzsche is writing against the long Western habit of treating Truth as a capital-T object awaiting discovery, guaranteed by God, Reason, or moral law. His broader project is genealogical: expose how our "highest" ideas are often the afterimage of power struggles, ressentiment, and selective forgetting. So the jab lands on multiple targets at once - religious dogma, positivist confidence, and any ideology that markets itself as obvious. If a truth arrives too simple, Nietzsche suggests, ask who benefits from you not asking more.