Quotes from Ludwig Feuerbach

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.

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[.]

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[.]

He who makes God act humanly, declares human activity to be divine[.]

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

T]o think God is therefore to affirm what God is, to establish the being of God as an act. That God is thought, cognised, is essential; that this tree is thought, is to the tree accidental, unessential. … [H]ow is it possible that God – if he is to exist for us, to be an object to us – must necessarily be thought … ? … [I]t is not possible.

T]hat which is the object of another being is dependent. … Thus the plant is dependent on air and light, that is, it is an object for air and light, not for itself. Physical life in general is nothing else than this perpetual interchange of the objective and subjective relation.

Faith does not limit itself by the idea of a world, a universe, a necessity.

T]he world springs out of a want, out of privation, but it is false speculation to make this privation an ontological being.

T]he imagination identifies … the external God with the soul of man. The imagination is … the true place of an existence which is absent, not present to the senses, though nevertheless sensational in its essence. Only the imagination solves the contradiction in an existence which is at once sensational and not sensational[.]

The Jewish people trusted thmself to do nothing except that what was commanded by God; they were without will even in external things; the authority of religion extended itself even to their food. The Christian religion, on the other hand, in all external things made humankind dependent on itself, i.e. placed in it what Judaism placed out of it. … Thus do things change. What yesterday was still religion is no longer such to-day; and what to-day is atheism, to-morrow will be religion.

Existence is one with self-consciousness; existence with self-consciousness is existence simply. If I do not know that I exist, it is all one whether I exist or not.

H]eavenly personality, or the perpetuation of human personality in heaven is nothing else than personality released from all earthly encumbrances and limitations[.] [H]ere we are men, there gods[.]

T]he Christians of former days … rejected the real life of the family, the intimate bond of love which is naturally moral as … undivine, unheavenly, … [I]n compensation they had a Father and Son in God, who embraced each other with heartfelt love, with that intense love which natural relationship alone inspires. … [H]ere the satisfaction of those profoundest human wants which, in reality, in life, they denied, became to them an object of contemplation in God.

Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity.

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

The belief in the immortality of man is the belief in the divinity of man[.]

A] being to whom his own species … is an object of thought can [also] make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought. Hence … man [has] a twofold life: … an inner and outer life. … Man thinks – that is, he converses with himself. Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality is an object of thought.

If thy predicates are anthropomorphisms, the subject is an anthropomorphism too.

Faith discriminates thus: This is true, that is false. And it claims truth to itself alone. Faith has for its object a definite, specific truth … One thing alone is truth, … God … ; all other gods are vain idols.

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

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.

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.

The notion that the fulfilment of prayer has been determined from eternity, that it was originally included in the plan of creation, is the empty, absurd fiction of a mechanical mode of thought, which is in absolute contradiction with the nature of religion. Whether God decides on the fulfilment of my prayer now, on the immediate occasion of my offering it, or whether he did decide on it long ago, is the same thing.