Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

"There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths"

About this Quote

Nietzsche doesn’t lob this line like a casual relativist; he throws it like a grenade into the Victorian parlor where “Truth” sat upright, dressed as God’s well-behaved cousin. “Eternal facts” and “absolute truths” are not just targets, they’re the cultural infrastructure of his time: Christian metaphysics, Enlightenment confidence, and the soothing idea that morality comes with a warranty.

The sentence works because it attacks two comforts at once. “Facts” sounds hard, empirical, modern; “truths” sounds lofty, moral, timeless. Nietzsche denies both the lab coat and the halo. The subtext is less “nothing is real” than “what you call reality has been curated.” Claims of permanence aren’t neutral descriptions; they’re power plays that freeze a particular viewpoint into law, theology, or common sense. When he says “no,” he’s also implying: whose interest is served when a belief is declared eternal?

Context matters: Nietzsche is writing in the aftermath of the “death of God,” his shorthand for the collapse of shared metaphysical certainty in Europe. If the old guarantor of meaning is gone, the hunger for absolutes doesn’t disappear; it migrates into nationalism, science-as-salvation, moral crusades. This line pre-empts that replacement therapy. It’s a warning that the craving for immovable truth can be a kind of intellectual panic.

The intent isn’t to leave you in nihilistic fog. It’s to force a more honest accounting: truths are made, not found; values are chosen, not delivered. That’s terrifying - and, for Nietzsche, the only starting point worth having.

Quote Details

TopicTruth
Source
Verified source: Human, All Too Human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches) (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878)
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Cross-Reference
Evidence:
But everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well. (Part I, Section One: "Of First and Last Things", Aphorism 2). This line is from Nietzsche's own work, Human, All Too Human (original German: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches). The commonly-circulated quote "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths" is a shortened/paraphrased extraction of the sentence above. The earliest publication is the first edition of Part I (A Book for Free Spirits), published in 1878. The Project Gutenberg link is an English edition text; it’s useful for verification of wording/location (aphorism/section), but it is not the original 1878 printing.
Other candidates (1)
Nature is the Absolute Truth (Deepak Gupta, 2025) compilation95.0%
... Friedrich Hegel voiced; God is the absolute truth. Absolute truths have layers and it would make you astonish unt...
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (2026, February 19). There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-no-eternal-facts-as-there-are-no-172649/

Chicago Style
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths." FixQuotes. February 19, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-no-eternal-facts-as-there-are-no-172649/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths." FixQuotes, 19 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-no-eternal-facts-as-there-are-no-172649/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Friedrich Add to List
There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths - Nietzsche
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a Philosopher from Germany.

185 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche
Rabindranath Tagore, Poet
Rabindranath Tagore
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic
Mary Baker Eddy, Theologian