Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

"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 something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
The beginning of existence is nourishment. Food is the beginning of wisdom. The first condition of putting anything into your head and heart is to put something into your stomach.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of mine-ness so that the other person may recognize it as his own.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
We have busied ourselves and contented ourselves long enough with speaking and writing; now at last we demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter; we are as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism; we are determined to become political materialists.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
To theology, … only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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 Andreas Feuerbach
Hegel determines and presents only the most striking differences of various religions, philosophies, time and peoples, and in a progressive series of stages, but he ignores all that is common and identical in all of them. … His system knows only subordination and succession; coordination and coexistence are unknown to it.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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 Andreas Feuerbach
Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason—a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings—distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Just as when a man commits suicide ne negates the body, this rational limit of subjectivity, so when he lapses into fantastic and trascendental practice he associates himself with embodied divine and ghostly appearances, namely, he negates in practise the difference between imagination and perception.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Hegel … proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect. … He does not appeal to the intellect within us.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
In practice, all men are Atheists; they deny their faith by their acts.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
What yesterday was still religion is no longer such today; and what today is athesim, tomorrow will be religion.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Nature returns no answer to the questions and lamentations of man; inexorably it refers him to himself.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Is it man that possesses love, or is it not much rather love that possesses man?

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Speculation is philosophy intoxicated; let philosophy get sober again; it will then be to the mind what pure spring water is to the body.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Who suspends one law of nature suspends them all.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this God consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man … that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.

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

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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.

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

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
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 Andreas Feuerbach