Quotes About Existence

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

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

M]an in religion – in his relation to God – is in relation to his own nature[.]

God … has no more significance for religion than a fundamental general principle has for … science[.]

T]he object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject's own … objective nature.

Only that which is apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who is my being? To doubt of God is to doubt of myself.

W]hile you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extra-naturalism of your own self.

According to Philo, God gave Moses power over the whole of Nature; all the elements obeyed him as the Lord of Nature. … Jehovah is Israel's consciousness of the sacredness and necessity of his own existence, - a necessity before which the existence of Nature, the existence of other nations, vanishes into nothing.

God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason[.]

T]ime is indifferent: its existence or non-existence depends only on the will. But this will is not its own will:- not only because a thing cannot will its non-existence, but for the prior reason that the world itself is destitute of will. Thus the nothingness of the world expresses the power of the will. … The existence of the world is therefore a momentary, arbitrary, i.e., unreal existence.

There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system. But by the suppositions of such beings we do not change our standing point – we extend our conception quantitively not qualitatively.

God … is nothing else than the nature of understanding made objective.

Consciousness in the strictest sense is present … in a being whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.

Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.

Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thy thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject … because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject[.]

Providence is a privilege of man. It expresses the value of man, in distinction from other natural beings … ; it exempts him from the connection of the universe. Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence, - a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things; it is the idealism of religion.

God is the mirror of man.

The doctrine of immortality is the final doctrine of religion; … it speaks out what it has hitherto suppressed. If elsewhere the religious soul concerns itself with the existence of another being, here it openly considers only its own existence[.]

God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth, the truth of man; … God, or what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives his nature, … These conditions, then, under which man conceives God, are to him the truth, and for that reason they are also … existence itself.

As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as under the dominance of these wants he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. [T]hat is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine universal human heart, recognised man only under the condition, the limitation, of belief in Christ.

It certainly is the interest of religion that its object should be distinct from man; but it is also … its interest that this object should have human attributes. That he should be a distinct being concerns his existence only; … that he should be human concerns his essence.

We consume the air and we are consumed by it; we enjoy and are enjoyed.

T]he understanding or the reason is the necessary being. … [I]f there were no reason, no consciousness, all would be nothing; existence would be equivalent to non-existence. Consciousness first founds the distinction between existence and non-existence. In consciousness is first revealed the value of existence, the value of nature.