123 Quotes by Ludwig Feuerbach

In place of [the classic spirit] … entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supranaturalistic subjectivity; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture. With Christianity man lost the capability of conceiving himself as a part of Nature.

The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective, i.e., supranatural or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and processes which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably.

God as an object of thought … is always a remote being; the relation … is an abstract one, … So long as we have not met a being face to face, we are always in doubt whether he is really such as we imagine him; … Christ … is the … certainty that God is what the soul desires and needs him to be. … [O]nly in Christ is the last wish of religion realised, … [W]hat god is in essence, … Christ is in actual appearance.

In Christianity, man was concentrated only on himself, he unlinked himself from the chain of sequences in the system of the universe, he made himself a self-sufficing whole, … [H]e no longer regarded himself as being immanent in the world, because he severed himself from connection with it[.]

My life is bound … ; not so the life of humanity, … [T]he future always unveils the fact that the alleged limits of the species were only limits of individuals. … [S]triking proofs of this are presented by the history of philosophy and … physical science. … Thus the species is unlimited; the individual alone limited.

The salvation of the soul is the fundamental idea, the main point in Christianity; … this salvation lies only in God … But God is absolute subjectivity, … separated from the world, … set free from matter, severed from … life … and … from the distinction of sex. Separation from the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore the ultimate aim of Christianity. … [T]his aim had its visible, practical realisation in Monachism.

[M]arriage is not holy in Christianity; … an unholy thing … excluded from heaven. … Where his heaven is, there is his heart, - heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought not to be. … [T]here [in heaven] dwell only pure sexless individuals: … the Christian excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true life[.]

The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life.

[T]he Christians abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species.