Essence of Christianity Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

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

“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.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“[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, Essence of Christianity

“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.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“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.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“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[.]”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity