Friedrich Nietzsche Religion Quotations

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer; and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

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

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

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.

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

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

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".

To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

"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?

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.

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

Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth. A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

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

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

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.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

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.

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.

I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.