Art is 'the highest manifestation of the life of men in common'.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (28 July 1804 – 13 September 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Art will only attain a high degree of dignity 'when it is understood, no longer alongside and outside of life, but as an integral part of it [...]'.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'The dignity of humanity is placed in your [artists'] hands, keep it intact! With you it falls! With you it will rise again!'
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
The characteristic feature of Wagner's thought is its astonishing unity: a unity that connects writings from different eras [...] through the commonality of the point of view.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
[Artistic thought is] an organic growth [...] in which what is new does not destroy what is old, but only expands it.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
True patriotism is made of concentric layers, whose center [...] is the love of family; without the latter, only a sordid association of interests remains.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'Our sympathies go to the vanquished hero, not the victorious one'.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
One finds [...] the fundamental, insurmountable antagonism between the mindset of the artist and that of the politician.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'The poet is the conscious voice of what is unconscious in us.'
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'Our god is money, our religion is profit'.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
When the statesman despairs [...] it is then the clear eye of the artist that discerns the forms [...] of a full and complete humanity.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'Condensation is the proper work of the creative intelligence'.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'The artist stands before his finished work of art as before an enigma, about which he can fall into the same errors as others'.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
In Germany, democracy is a being of pure translation.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
'We recognize the principle of the decline of humanity, and consequently the necessity of its regeneration; we believe in the possibility of this regeneration [...].'
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Perhaps one should abide by the author's judgment, and not needlessly increase the mass of documents [...] that he himself deemed negligible.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Revealed belief corrupts [...] the moral sense, [...] unfortunately it does even more, it treacherously poisons the sense of truth, which is the most precious, the most delicate, the most divine in our being. Therein lies its true crime against humanity.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
[...] your biblical faith is sincere [...] only when it accepts as the divine word everything, absolutely everything, that one reads in the Holy Scripture; but as soon as you establish distinctions [...] you are splitting hairs, you are nothing but hypocrites who pretend to be believers.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Reason thus finds itself degraded to the point of doing what is not its domain, and not doing what is; it no longer has a criterion in itself, it no longer distinguishes between true and false [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The more progress man makes in scientific and industrial civilization, the more his reason rebels against revealed faith [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The severe word of Kant is a manifesto in which Morality announces that it is free and independent of any kind of revelation, of any kind of God above or below [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
[...] if you practice your Christian virtues only because you want to love God and be loved by him, you are not virtuous out of love for the Good and hatred for Evil; [...] you fall into the cult of Personality: it is spiritualized egoism, but egoism nonetheless.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
[...] making oneself the sole cherished object of the Supreme Being is a much more powerful pride than that which aspires only to be cherished and admired by present and future men. Christian pride hides itself; it has the appearance of its opposite.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
God is personality, and at the same time he is impersonality, universality. God is therefore personified nonsense.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
God, this purely ideal, purely rational entity, does not exist outside of our idea, outside of our reason.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Today, the issue is not the existence or non-existence of God, but the existence or non-existence of man; we must concern ourselves [...] with the equality of men among themselves [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
When I deny God, it means, philosophically speaking, that I deny the negation of man, and to deny a negation is to affirm.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
God is the essence of objectified imagination, he is the personification and deification of our imagination [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The dogma of the Trinity therefore requires man to think the opposite of what he imagines and to imagine the opposite of what he thinks [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
[...] it is my soul that commands this bread, and not at all the bread that commands my soul [...] It is therefore feeling, and only feeling, that makes the difference between a divine bread and a profane bread [...].
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Psychology (anthropology) will necessarily be the theology of the future.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
There is no essential difference between a wooden image and an imaginative image [...] The adoration of the sculpted or painted image [...] is but the external, physical manifestation of the inner, spiritual adoration.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
An image remains essentially an image everywhere, whether sculpted and painted, or simply imaginative [...] and in adoring the god it represents, one cannot help but adore it at the same time.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The word is also an image, an eminently abstract image; indeed, by pronouncing the name of a thing, one imagines one knows the thing itself.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The word of man is divine, in other words: it is an immense and incommensurable power like thought, of which it is the invisible body.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The word makes man free; as long as he cannot speak, he is a slave: an outrageous passion, an excessive joy, an extreme sorrow, are equally mute.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The religious man places in God what he has recognized as true reality; from this disposition arises the dogma of the word of God; this dogma [...] means: the human word is divine.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Any mediating being between God and the universe is therefore a being of the imagination.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Man is a god to man: the I and the Thou, that is the primitive pivot of his existence and his consciousness.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
To believe that the existence of the world is explained by a creator is a psychological illusion.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The mystical philosopher meditates on the reason for being of nature and man, but he does so in the imagination; he believes he is meditating [...] on another personal Being, different from man and nature.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The creation of the world means that it is but a phantom, a nullity. With the beginning of a thing, its end is also necessarily posited.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Providence is evidently the conviction that man has of the infinite value of his existence; it is religious idealism.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The love that God has for me is nothing other than my own self-love deified and personified.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
In the divine essence, there is absolutely nothing other than man; the secret of theology is anthropology.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
Man, without wanting to, without knowing it, creates God in his human image: later this created God creates, wanting to, knowing it, the universe and man.
1841
Source: Feuerbach - What is Religion?/The Essence of Christianity
The only thing one could give him was love, 'that homeland of his art,' as he himself calls it.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Those who helped this man were not fully aware of who he truly was. They barely suspected his true greatness.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
[He] preferred to rush into the unknown [...] rather than abdicate a single particle of his independence.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Nothing infuriated him more than the follies of well-intentioned but unintelligent supporters.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
[He] was truly one of those all-too-rare men who, by giving everything within them until nothing is left, thereby show themselves to be related to genius.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
The source of inspiration remains forever hidden from us [...]. Logic loses its rights, and if a necessity drives genius to produce, the law of that necessity remains within itself.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
What makes the tragedy of my current destiny is that my boldest undertakings must serve to make me a living.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
The most perfect being is always attached to humanity by a small corner of imperfection.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
It is only when we have understood how deeply [the artist] suffered [...] for an inaccessible ideal, that we begin to conceive who he was.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
One must always see the symptom of some obstacle in the fact that an artist interrupts his creative work to present himself to the world as a theorist.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Women [...] are the music of life: they know how to accept and assimilate everything [...] frankly and with fewer reservations, to further embellish it with their sympathy.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Never has a man lived who cared less for what we mean by the words glory and success.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
A man is best portrayed in his career, in his works, and in his words.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
But there is only one way, one path to learn to know, and that is to love.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
What beauty and magnificence are for the artist, the prosaic and ordinary being cannot conceive.
1896
Source: Richard Wagner, his life and works
Classical paganism was characterized by unity; dualism, division, disagreement in all things are the character of Christianity.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
Christianity adds superfluous evils to inevitable evils, [...] bodily sufferings to sufferings of the soul, natural contrasts to unnatural contrasts.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The idea of sacrifice is the highest idea of Christianity; but what sacrifice is greater for the natural man than the sacrifice of the sexual drive?
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
For love, what is earthly is heavenly; the happiness it finds in itself is the supreme bliss. Love elevates the finite to the infinite.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The artist triumphs over his faith, rises above it by making the objects of his faith objects of art.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
Art is art only when it is its own end, absolutely free, when it knows no higher laws than its own, the laws of truth and beauty.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
Where unnatural virtue passes for the supreme virtue, [...] there the aesthetic sense, the supreme condition of art, is decreed banished.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The contradiction of Catholicism with human nature was the intimate foundation of the Reformation.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
If you make reason a prisoner under the domination of faith, why do you not place your own nature in the custody of Christian virtue?
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
Paganism sacrificed bodies, whereas Christianity sacrifices souls.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The spirit of science is [...] a universal spirit, [...] the nameless spirit, neither Christian nor pagan.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
Science frees the mind, expands the senses and the heart; theology compresses and crushes them.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The foundation of theology is the miracle, the will, the refuge of ignorance [...]; the foundation of philosophy is the nature of things, reason, the mother of law and necessity.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
Philosophy is not a cosmo-theogony [...]. It is the science of silent spirits, of the principles and laws that direct nature and humanity.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The marvelous in nature, the divine breath that stirs and penetrates it, is the law that is within it.
1842-1845
Source: Feuerbach - Religion/Catholicism — Protestantism — Theology
The essence of man in general.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The essence of religion in general.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
God as a being of reason.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
God as a moral being or law.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
God as a merciful being.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The mystery of prayer.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The mystery of faith.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The mystery of the miracle.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The mystery of the resurrection [...].
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The mystery of Christ or of the personal God.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The Christian heaven or personal immortality.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The contradiction in the existence of God.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The contradiction in the revelation of God.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity
The contradiction of faith and love.
1841
Source: The Essence of Christianity