Ludwig Feuerbach > Quotes

“As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach

“I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

“Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

“God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

“The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“The idea of God is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

“The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

“If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity. Not because … God is love, but because of his love, of the predicate, … ; thus love is a higher power and truth[.] Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty. … [W]hat sort of love was that? … [I]t was love to man. … [T]hough there is … a self-interested love among men, still true human love … is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our saviour … ? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature – qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Each planet has its own sun. … [I]t really is another sun on Uranus … The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature … Hence each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please. Thus, if I would found morality on God, I must first of all place it in God: for Morality, Right, in short, all substantial relations, have their only basis in themselves, can only have a real foundation—such as truth demands—when they are thus based. (…) Where man is in earnest about ethics, they have in themselves the validity of a divine power. If morality has no foundation in itself, there is no inherent necessity for morality; morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“The law holds man in bondage; love makes him free.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Because of … this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; … God is … a subject; … the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians … deify the human individual, make him the absolute being.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“[T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“Faith in the power of prayer … is … faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is … the essence of faith in general. … [F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, … The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; … To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith[.]”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“To every religion the gods of other religions are only notions concerning God, but its own conception of God is to it God himself, the true God.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“God as God is feeling … yet shut up, hidden; … Christ is the unclosed, open feeling of the heart. … Christ is the joyful certainty of feeling that its wishes hidden in God have truth and reality, the actual victory over death, over all the powers of the world and Nature, the resurrection no longer merely hoped for, but already accomplished; … the Godhead made visible.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity