Religion Nietzsche Quotes & Sayings

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that! — Friedrich Nietzsche

In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion
religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people. — Friedrich Nietzsche

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found
I have letters that even the blind will be able to see ... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,
I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man? — Friedrich Nietzsche

One is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its physiological origins. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is however a disgrace to pray! Not for all, but for you, and me, and whoever has his a conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when, with a terror-inspiring ingenuity, he placed above the gateway of his hell the inscription, 'I too was created by eternal love'
at any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise ... the inscription 'I too was created by eternal hate' ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Heaven Inc. Board of Directors, whom one has to thank for the origin of most mainstream religion, are also the ones responsible for ending any god's career. Nietzsche knew that as the CEO, he could influence the outcome of world religion but he needed to come up with something big. Something inspirational. Something with pizazz. Something that would fire up the imagination of the other members. The board was newly elected. They were shy, passive, reflexive, and thoroughly stupid — Dylan Callens

For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche may have been accurately describing the feeble pietism that surrounded him, the saccharine portraits of Jesus from childhood, but he could not have been more incorrect in his analysis that as a religion of the "sick soul," the preaching of Christ was simply a message of resignation to the powers and principalities. On the contrary, it was the most radical renunciation of the herd mentality that keeps us addicted to the power brokers of this age. — Michael S. Horton

God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints in the wilderness? Around them was not only the devil loose around them- but also the swine. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. — Kurt Vonnegut

The life of West, Nietzsche said, is based on Christianity. The values of the West are based on Christianity. Some of these values seem to have taken a life of their own, and this gives us the illusion that we can get rid of Christianity and keep the values. This, Nietzsche says, is an illusion ... Remove the Christian foundation, and the values must go too. — Dinesh D'Souza

The main concern of all great religions has been to fight a certain weariness and heaviness grown to epidemic proportions. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of super terrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The transition from Religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, which is not to be recommended. In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be employed to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions. Out of the illogical comes much good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life. It is only the naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one. We have yet to learn that others can suffer, and this can never be completely learned. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Since I was in flight from religion, I assumed that my classmates had to be in flight from religion too, albeit in a quieter, savvier way than I had as yet been able to discover. Only today do I realize how mistaken I was. They were never in flight at all. Nor are their children in flight, or their grandchildren. By the time I reached by seventieth year, I used to predict, all the churches in the world would have been turned into barns or museums or potteries. But I was wrong. Behold, new churches spring up every day, all over the place, to say nothing of mosques. So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: while it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home. — J.M. Coetzee

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart, searching among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for disincarnate spirituality, for charity and benevolence, will soon be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. For there is nothing here that suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty. We hear nothing but the accents of an exuberant, triumphant life in which all things, whether good or evil, are deified. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In Nietzsche's usage, the word 'Christianity' does not even refer primarily to the religion; using it like a code word, he is thinking more of a particular religio-metaphysically influenced disposition, an ascetically (in the penitent and self-denying sense) defined attitude to the world, an unfortunate form of life deferral, focus on the hereafter and quarrel with secular facts — Peter Sloterdijk

School has no task more important than to teach strict thought, cautious judgment, and logical conclusions, hence it must pay no attention to what hinders these operations, such as religion, for instance. — Friedrich Nietzsche

"God", "the immortality of the soul", "salvation", "the beyond"-even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them-maybe I was never childish enough for that? — Friedrich Nietzsche

To become the founder of a new religion one must be psychologically infallible in one's knowledge of a certain average type of souls who have not yet recognized that they belong together. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God. ... Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ. — Seraphim Rose

Nietzsche says God is dead. Probably now God says Nietzsche is dead! The one that will die is religion, not the God! God will always live! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature
: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too. — Walter Kaufmann

Once blasphemy again God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and thereupon those blasphemers died too. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree. — Bobby Fischer

Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He was a hidden God, full of secrecy. Truly, he did not come by his son otherwise than by secret ways. At the door of his faith stands adultery.
Whoever extols him as a God of love, does not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loves irrespective of reward and requital.
When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.
At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother. [...] and one day he suffocated of his all-too-great pity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Necessary. - One of those things that may drive a thinker into despair is the recognition of the fact that the illogical is necessary for man, and that out of the illogical comes much that is good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything that gives value to life, that it cannot be withdrawn without thereby hopelessly injuring these beautiful things. It — Friedrich Nietzsche

The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage — Friedrich Nietzsche

Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche's useful phrase, 'the bad odours of religion'. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don't go on pilgrimages. We can't build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society. — Alain De Botton

Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people
including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh
struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124) — David N. Elkins

The "religion of pity" to which people would like to convert us- oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and women who need this religion at present as a veil and an adornment! — Friedrich Nietzsche

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. — N. T. Wright

All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness". — Friedrich Nietzsche

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies ... Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers. — Thomas C. Oden

As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies - but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims ... this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists
and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland. — Chester Elijah Branch

I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the earth, believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poisoners are they. — Friedrich Nietzsche

... if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible stress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who says:Who is more ungodly than I, that I may rejoice in his teaching? — Friedrich Nietzsche

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur. — Julius Evola

Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed? — Friedrich Nietzsche

A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you are unwilling to endure your own suffering even for an hour, and ontinually forestall all possible misfortune, if you regard as deserving of annihilation, any suffering and pain generally as evil, as detestable, and as blots on existence, well, you have then, besides your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart (and this is perhaps the mother of the former)-the religion of smug ease. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones!for happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grow tall together, or, as with you, remain small together! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity is religion for the executioner. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Do not paint a picture either of God or the devil on your walls: this will ruin both your walls and the atmosphere. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbour says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity is called the religion of pity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion. — Michel Houellebecq

Religion has debased the concept "man"; its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through an act of grace - — Friedrich Nietzsche

People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous. — Friedrich Nietzsche

New struggles.
After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries
a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed.
And we
we must still defeat his shadow as well! — Friedrich Nietzsche

What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche's late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist , to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety. — John Carroll

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love. — Friedrich Nietzsche