Ludwig Feuerbach Quotes

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.

I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.

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.

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.

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.

The idea of God is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it.

[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.

The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.

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.

The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life

[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.

A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle.

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.

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.

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[.]

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.

Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]

The law holds man in bondage; love makes him free.

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.

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.

Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.

[T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.

In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself.

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.

[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, ‘Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this, its natural character, it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance.’ Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world.

The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; … in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.

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.

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.

By the word materialism, the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit-hunting, and stock-exchange swindling — in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy, and in a general way a “better world”, of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only so long as he is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary “materialist” excesses. It is then that he sings his favorite song, What is man? — Half beast, half angel.

[T]o a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding[.]

[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]

We know the man by the object[.] Even the moon, the sun, stars, … [t]hat he sees them is an evidence of his own nature.

Whatever kind of object … we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature[.]

Wherever this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained mastery of faith.

[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]

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.

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[.]

Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. … God is … infinite, man … finite … ; God … perfect, man imperfect; … God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful.

[S]o much worth … a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.

Nature is precisely what separates man from God … [R]eligion believes that one day this wall of separation will fall away. One day there will be no Nature, no matter, no body, at least none such as to separate man from God: then there will be only God[.]

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.

Man, by means of the imagination, involuntarily contemplates his inner nature; he represents it as out of himself. The nature of man, of the species – thus working on him through the irresistible power of the imagination, and contemplated as the law of his thought and action – is God.

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.

Many gnostics, then, would have agreed in principle with Ludwig Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century psychologist, that “theology is really anthropology” (the term derives, of course, from anthropos, and means “study of humanity”). For gnostics, exploring the psyche became explicitly what it is for many people today implicitly—a religious quest. Some who seek their own interior direction, like the radical gnostics, reject religious institutions as a hindrance to their progress. Others, like the Valentinians, willingly participate in them, although they regard the church more as an instrument of their own self-discovery than as the necessary “ark of salvation.

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche). Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs. In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.

Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. … [S]peculations and controversies concerning the personality or impersonality of God are therefore fruitless, idle, uncritical … ; … they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-preservation[.]

Of course, the champions of totalitarianism protest that what they want to abolish is "only economic freedom" and that all "other freedoms" will remain untouched. But freedom is indivisible. The distinction between an economic sphere of human life and activity and a noneconomic sphere is the worst of their fallacies. If an omnipotent authority has the power to assign to every individual the tasks he has to perform, nothing that can be called freedom and autonomy is left to him. He has only the choice between strict obedience and death by starvation.1 Committees of experts may be called to advise the planning authority whether or not a young man should be given the opportunity to prepare himself for and to work in an intellectual or artistic field. But such an arrangement can merely rear disciples committed to the parrotIike repetition of the ideas of the preceding generation. It would bar innovators who disagree with the accepted ways of thought. No innovation would ever have been accomplished if its originator had been in need of an authorization by those from whose doctrines and methods he wanted to deviate. Hegel would not have ordained Schopenhauer or Feuerbach, nor would Professor Rau have ordained Marx or Carl Menger. If the supreme planning board is ultimately to determine which books are to be printed, who is to experiment in the laboratories and who is to paint or to sculpture, and which alterations in technological methods should be undertaken, there will be neither improvement nor progress. Individual man will become a pawn in the hands of the rulers, who in their "social engineering" will handle him as engineers handle the stuff of which they construct buildings, bridges, and machines. In every sphere of human activity an innovation is a challenge not only to ali routinists and to the experts and practitioners of traditional methods but even more to those who have in the past themselves been innovators. It meets at the beginning chiefly stubborn opposition. Such obstacles can be overcome in a society where there is economic freedom. They are insurmountable in a socialist system.

[I]t implies great force of subjectivity to accept as certain something in contradiction with rational, normal experience. … Wishes own no restraint, no law, no time; they would be fulfilled without delay on the instant. And behold! miracle is as rapid as a wish is impatient. … [I]t is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of Nature and reason, but only in its mode and process; … The power of miracle is … the power of the imagination.

True love is sufficient to itself; it needs no special title, no authority … [I]t is … the original source of love, out of which the love of Christ himself arose. … Are we to love each other because Christ loved us? Such love would be an affected, imitative love. Can we truly love each other only if we love Christ? … Shall I love Christ more than mankind? Is not such love a chimerical love? … What ennobled Christ was love; … he was not the proprietor of love … The idea of love is an independent idea: I do not first deduce it from the life of Christ; on the contrary, I revere that life only because I find it accordant with the … idea of love.

The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity became dominant. Herein we have … confirmation … that Christianity does not contain within itself the principle of culture. Where man immediately identifies the species with the individual, and posits this identity as his highest being, as God, where the idea of humanity is thus an object to him only as the idea of the Godhead, there the need of culture has vanished; man has all in himself, all in his God, consequently he has no need to supply his own deficiencies by others as the representatives of the species, or by the contemplation of the world generally; and this need alone is the spring of culture.

[I]n love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; … the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, … The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; … friendship is a means of virtue, and more: it is … dependent however on participation. … [I]t cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-contemplation. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. … However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others.

History is as little able as cognition to reach a final conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity; a perfect society, a perfect "state," are things which can only exist in the imagination. On the contrary, every successive historical situation is only a transitory stage in the endless course of development of society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But it becomes decrepit and unjustified in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb. It must give way to a higher stage which in its turn will also decay and perish.

The world is to be comprehended not as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes, in which apparently stable things no less than the concepts, their mental reflections in our heads, go through an uninterrupted change of coming in to being and passing away, in which, through all the seeming contingency and in spite of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development finally asserts itself.

What is now recognized as true also has its hidden false side which will later manifest itself, just as what is now recognized as false also has its true side, by virtue of which it could previously be regarded as true; that what is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer contingencies, and that the so-called accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself - and so on.

Pensar significa leer en el evangelio de los sentimientos

Der Religion ist nur das Heilige wahr, der Philosophie ist nur das Wahre heilig.

The power of miracle is the power of imagination. ― Ludwig Feuerbach The miracle is the supreme reality, a power. Imagination is beyond reality, a powerless illusion. ― Ehsan Sehgal

La mort c'est la fin du fini, c'est le commencement de l'infini.

That he is, he has to thank Nature; that he is man, he has to thank man; spiritually as well as physically he can achieve nothing without his fellow-man. Four hands can do more than two, but also four eyes can see more than two. … In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite. The knowledge of a single man is limited, but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind; … the scientific genius of a particular age comprehends in itself the thinking powers of the preceding age[.]

Only through his fellow does man become clear to himself and self-conscious; … A man existing absolutely alone would lose himself without any sense of his individuality in the ocean of Nature; he would neither comprehend himself as man nor Nature as Nature.

[P]ersonal theism conceives God as a personal being, separate from all material things; it excludes him from all development, because that is nothing else than the self-separation of being from circumstances and conditions which do not correspond to its true idea. … [I]n God … beginning, end, middle are not to be distinguished … [H]e is at once what he is, is from the beginning … ; he is the pure unity of existence and essence, reality and idea, act and will. … [T]hey [gods] have bodies like men, but bodies from which the limitations and difficulties of the human body are eliminated.

[T]he effect of the creation, all its majesty for the feelings and the imagination, is quite lost if the production of the world … is not taken in its real sense.

The creation of the world expressed nothing else than subjectivity, assuring itself of its own reality and infinity through the consciousness that the world is created, is a product of will, … When thou sayest the world was made out of nothing, thou conceivest the world the world itself as nothing, … for the world is the limitation of thy will, … ; the world alone obstructs thy soul; it alone is the wall of separation between thee and God, … ; thou thinkest God by himself, … the subjectivity or soul which enjoys itself alone, which needs not the world, which knows nothing of the painful bonds of matter. In the inmost depths of thy soul thou wouldest rather there were no world, for where the world is, there is matter, and where there is matter there is weight and resistance, space and time, limitation and necessity. … How dost thou expel the world from thy consciousness, that it may not disturb thee … ? [B]y making the world itself a product of will, … hovering between existence and non-existence, always awaiting its annihilation. … [H]ence its end is daily looked forward to with longing.

[M]an … makes Nature merely the servant of his will and needs, and … degrades it to a mere machine, a product of the will. … [I]ts existence is intelligible to him, … he explains and interprets it out of himself, in accordance with his own feelings and notions.

[T]he object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject's own … objective nature.

[T]he understanding or the reason is the necessary being. … [I]f there were no reason, no consciousness, all would be nothing; existence would be equivalent to non-existence. Consciousness first founds the distinction between existence and non-existence. In consciousness is first revealed the value of existence, the value of nature.

The conception of the morally perfect being is no merely theoretical, inert conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not. … [R]eligion renders this disunion all the more painful … [I]t sets man's own nature before him as a separate being.

[E]very understanding which I posit as different from my own, is only a position of my own understanding, i.e. an idea of my own, a conception which falls within my power of thought, and thus expressed my understanding. … What I think of as united, I unite; what I think of as distinct, I distinguish; … [M]y understanding or my imagination is itself the power of uniting … ; understanding is only the understanding which exists in man[.]

We consume the air and we are consumed by it; we enjoy and are enjoyed.

In breathing I am an object of the air, the air the subject; but when I make the air an object of thought, of investigation, when I analyse it, I reverse the relation - I make myself the subject, the air an object.

God does not negative himself in the Incarnation, but he shows himself as that which he is, as a human being.

So long as love is not exalted into substance, … an essence, so long there lurks in the background of love a subject who even without love is something by himself, an unloving monster, a diabolical being, [who] … delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers, - the phantom of religious fanaticism.

Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity.

Faith in Providence is faith in one's own worth, … [H]ence also false humility, religious arrogance, which, it is true, does not rely on itself, but only because it commits the care of itself to the blessed God. God … wills that I shall be blest; but that is my will also: … God's love for me [is] nothing else than my own self-love deified.

God as God is the sum of all human perfection; God as Christ is the sum of all human misery. … If God … is … abstract philosophy: … Christ … is … pure suffering - … what makes more impression on the heart than suffering? especially the suffering … of the innocent endured purely for the good of others ..?

God is the mirror of man.

That which has essential value for man, which he esteems the perfect, the excellent, in which he has true delight, - that alone is God to him. … Therefore, the feeling, sensitive man believes only in a feeling, sensitive God, … [T]hat alone is holy to man which lies deepest within him, which is … the basis, the essence of his individuality. To the feeling man a God without feeling is an empty, abstract, negative God[.]

[O]ne need only be attentive … to convince oneself that the true principle of creation is the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature. God produces the world outside himself; at first it is only an idea, a plan, a resolve; now it becomes an act, and therefore it steps forth out of God as a distinct and, relatively at least, a self-subsistent object. But just so subjectivity in general, which distinguishes itself from the world, which takes itself for an essence distinct from the world, posits the world out of itself as a separate existence, indeed, this positing out of self, and the distinguishing of self, is one act. When therefore the world is posited outside of God, God is posited by himself, is distinguished from the world. What else then is God but your subjective nature, when the world is separated from it?

Everything that exists has value, is a being of distinction … [H]ence it asserts, maintains itself.

In order to banish from the mind the identity of the divine … recourse is had to the idea that God, as the absolute, real Being, has an infinite fulness of various predicates, of which we here know only a part, … those such as are analogous to our own; while the rest, by virtue of which God must have quite a different nature from the human … , we shall only know in the future – that is, after death.

Spinoza, Comte, Goethe, Ludwig Feuerbach.

[M]an in religion – in his relation to God – is in relation to his own nature[.]

Pelagianism denies God, … It has only the creator, i.e. Nature as a basis, not the Saviour, … – in a word, it denies God; … as a consequence of this, it elevates man into God, … Augustinianism denies man[.]

In the perception of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; … in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. … The object of the sense is … indifferent … ; … the object of religion is a selected object; … it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy.

There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system. But by the suppositions of such beings we do not change our standing point – we extend our conception quantitively not qualitatively.

Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature. … [T]he essence of religion … is evident to the thinker … . [T]he antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory; … it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual.

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, … The divine being is … human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective … All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.

[I]t is necessary to man to have a definite conception of God, … since he is man he can no more form other than a human conception of him. … [T]hese predicates are certainly without any objective validity; but … if he is to exist for me, he cannot appear otherwise than as he does appear to me, namely as a being with attributes analogous to human. … I cannot know whether God is something else in himself or for himself than he is for me; what he is to me is all that he is. For me, there lies in these predicates under which he exists for me, what he is in himself; his very nature; he is for me what he alone can ever be for me. The religious man finds perfect satisfaction in that which God is in relation to himself; of any other relation he knows nothing; for God is to him what he can alone be to man.

[M]an does not stand above this his necessary conception; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him.

[I]f God as a subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate, is determining, then in truth the rank of the godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.

[W]hen it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; … that the predicate is the true subject; it is also proved that if the divine predicates are attributes of the human nature, the subject of those predicates is also … human nature.

[T]he understanding … has its essence in itself, consequently it has nothing, together with or external to itself, which can be ranged beside it; it is incapable of being compared, because it is itself the source of all combinations and comparisons; … we measure all things by understanding alone; … it is … the principle of all generalising, of all classification, … [I]t circumscribes all things and beings. The definitions which the speculative philosophers and theologians give … , all these definitions are … ideas drawn solely from the nature of the understanding.

[A] merely personal God is an abstract God; but so he ought to be – that is involved in the idea of him; for he is nothing else than the personal nature of man positing himself out of all connection with the world, making itself free from all dependence on nature.

[T]ime is indifferent: its existence or non-existence depends only on the will. But this will is not its own will:- not only because a thing cannot will its non-existence, but for the prior reason that the world itself is destitute of will. Thus the nothingness of the world expresses the power of the will. … The existence of the world is therefore a momentary, arbitrary, i.e., unreal existence.

[O]mnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and limitations[.]

[I]n no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates. … These have an intrinsic independent reality; they are self-evident truths to him. … It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom, are chimæras because the existence of God is a chimæra. … The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine.

The Christians made mental phenomena into independent beings, their own feelings into qualities of things, the passions which governed them into powers which governed the world, in short, predicates of their own nature, whether recognised as such or not, into independent, subjective existences.

God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth, the truth of man; … God, or what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives his nature, … These conditions, then, under which man conceives God, are to him the truth, and for that reason they are also … existence itself.