Quotes from Ludwig Feuerbach

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Der Mensch ist, was er isst. Man is what he eats.

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

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.

Man is what he eats.

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

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[.]

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[.]

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[.]