Best 61 quotes of Ludwig Feuerbach on MyQuotes

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

"Can any good come out of Nazareth?" This is always the question of the wiseacres and the knowing ones. But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always different from what was expected. Everything new is received with contempt-for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.

Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, and it is nothing more than a fixed idea.

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.

Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.

For the religious the holy is truth, for the philosophic the truth is holy.

He only is a true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being - for example, love, wisdom and justice - are nothing.

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.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.

It is as clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God and that there can be none.

It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.

Man created God in his own image.

My only wish isto transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are half animal, half angel into persons, into whole persons.

Only he is a truly ethical, a truly human being, who has the courage to see through his own religious feelings and needs.

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.

The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist, was er isst].

The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world's History.

The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life

Theology is Anthropology... [T]he distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity.

The power of miracle is the power of imagination.

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 present age ... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence ... for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

The religion of Big Data sets itself the goal of fulfilling man's unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignores her attainable needs.

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

This work, though it deals only with eating and drinking, which are regarded in the eyes of our supernaturalistic mock-culture as the lowest acts, is of the greatest philosophic significance and importance... How former philosophers have broken their heads over the question of the bond between body and soul! Now we know, on scientific grounds, what the masses know from long experience, that eating and drinking hold together body and soul, that the searched-for bond is nutrition.

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

What else is the power of melody but the power of feeling? Music is the language of feeling; melody is audible feeling - feeling communicating itself.

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.

While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul,Christ exclaims,'If it is possible, let this cup pass from me'.Christ in this respect is the self- confession of human sensibility.

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

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

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

[D]oubt, the principle of theoretic freedom, appears to me a crime. … [T]he highest crime is doubt in God, or the doubt that God exists. … [T]hat which I do not trust myself to doubt, … without feeling disturbed in my soul, without incurring guilt; that is no matter of theory, but a matter of conscience[.]

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.

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[.]

Faith in the real annihilation of the world - … a world antagonistic to the wishes of the Christian is therefore a phenomenon belonging to the inmost 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.

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.

How can the feeling man resist feeling, the loving one love? Who has not experienced the overwhelming power of melody? And what else is melody but the power of feeling? Music is the language of feeling; … feeling communicates itself. … Is it man that possesses love, or is it not … love that possesses man? When love impels a man to suffer death even joyfully for the beloved one, is this death-conquering power his own individual power, or is it not rather the power of love?

I by no means say … God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, … . I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them[.]

I do not regard the limits of the past and present as the limits of humanity of the future

[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.

[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.

In reality, where everything passes on naturally, the copy follows the original, the image the thing which it represents, the thought its object, but on the supernatural, miraculous ground of theology, the original follows the copy, the thing its own likeness. "it is strange" says St. Augustine, "But nevertheless true, that this world could not exist if it was not known to God." That means the world is known and thought before it exists; nay it exists only because it was thought of. The existence is a consequence of the knowledge or of the act of thinking, the original a consequence of the copy, the object a consequence of its likeness.

[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.

[M]an places the aim of his action in God, but God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself.

Öteki dünya inancı fantezinin hakikatine duyulan inançtan başka bir şey değildir, tıpkı tanrı inancının, insanın duygu dünyasının hakikatine ve sonsuzluğuna olan inanç olması gibi. Ya da: Tanrı inancının, sadece insanın soyut özüne duyulan inanç olması gibi, öteki dünya inancı da sadece soyut bu dünya inancıdır.

Providence has relation essentially to man. It is for man's sake that Providence makes of things whatever it pleases; it is for man's sake that it supersedes the authority and reality of a law otherwise omnipotent. … [W]e nowhere read that God, for the sake of brutes, became a brute – the very idea of this is, in the eyes of religion, impious and ungodly; or that God ever performed a miracle for the sake of animals or plants. On the contrary, we read that a poor fig-tree, because it bore no fruit at a time when it could not bear it, was cursed, purely in order to give man an example of the power of faith over Nature[.]

[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.