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The collection / 307 fragments

Faith.

Explore passages mentioning faith, god, prayer. Topic suggestions use transparent word matching, not scholarly classification. Editorial meanings and lexical matches are discovery aids, not independent authentication of a quotation.

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01c. 1872 AD
There is, certainly, also an entirely different species of genius, that of justice; and I cannot make up my mind to estimate it lower than any kind of philosophical, political, or artistic genius. Its peculiarity is to go, with heartfelt aversion, out of the way of everything that blinds and confuses people's judgment of things; it is consequently an adversary of convictions, for it wants to give their own to all, whether they be living or dead, real or imaginary—and for that purpose it must know thoroughly; it therefore places everything in the best light and goes around it with careful eyes. Finally, it will even give to its adversary the blind or short-sighted "conviction" (as men call it,—among women it is called "faith"), what is due to conviction—for the sake of truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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02c. 1872 AD
The Metaphysicians' Knapsack.—To all who talk so boastfully of the scientific basis of their metaphysics it is best to make no reply. It is enough to tug at the bundle that they rather shyly keep hidden behind their backs. If one succeeds in lifting it, the results of that “scientific basis” come to light, to their great confusion: a dear little “God,” a genteel immortality, perhaps a little spiritualism, and in any case a complicated mass of poor-sinners'-misery and pharisee-arrogance.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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05c. 1872 AD
The Fulfilment of Christianity.—In Christianity there is also an Epicurean trend of thought, starting from the idea that God can only demand of man, his creation and his image, what it is possible for man to fulfil, and accordingly that Christian virtue and perfection are attainable and often attained. Now, for instance, the belief in loving one's enemies—even if it is only a belief or fancy, and by no means a psychological reality (a real love)—gives unalloyed happiness, so long as it is genuinely believed. (As to the reason of this, psychologist and Christian might well differ.) Hence earthly life, through the belief, I mean the fancy, that it satisfies not only the injunction to love our enemies, but all the other injunctions of Christianity, and that it has really assimilated and embodied in itself the Divine perfection according to the command, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” might actually become a holy life. Thus error can make Christ's promise come true.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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06c. 1872 AD
Speech and Emotion.—That speech is not given to us to communicate our emotions may be seen from the fact that all simple men are ashamed to seek for words to express their deeper feelings. These feelings are expressed only in actions, and even here such men blush if others seem to divine their motives. After all, among poets, to whom God generally denies this shame, the more noble are more monosyllabic in the language of emotion, and evince a certain constraint: whereas the real poets of emotion are for the most part shameless in practical life.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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07c. 1872 AD
Criticism and Joy.—Criticism, one-sided and unjust as well as intelligent criticism, gives so much pleasure to him who exercises it that the world is indebted to every work and every action that inspires much criticism and many critics. For criticism draws after it a glittering train of joyousness, wit, self-admiration, pride, instruction, designs of improvement.—The God of joy created the bad and the mediocre for the same reason that he created the good.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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08c. 1872 AD
The Mouthpiece of the Gods.—The poet expresses the universal higher opinions of the nation, he is its mouthpiece and flute; but by virtue of metre and all other artistic means he so expresses them that the nation regards them as something quite new and wonderful, and believes in all seriousness that he is the mouthpiece of the Gods. Yes, under the clouds of creation the poet himself forgets whence he derives all his intellectual wisdom—from father and mother, from teachers and books of all kinds, from the street and particularly from the priest. He is deceived by his own art, and really believes, in a naïve period, that a God is speaking through him, that he is creating in a state of religious inspiration. As a matter of fact, he is only saying what he has learnt, a medley of popular wisdom and popular foolishness. Hence, so far as a poet is really vox populi he is held to be vox dei.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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09c. 1872 AD
What all Art wants to Do and Cannot.—The last and hardest task of the artist is the presentment of what remains the same, reposes in itself, is lofty and simple and free from the bizarre. Hence the noblest forms of moral perfection are rejected as inartistic by weaker artists, because the sight of these fruits is too painful for their ambition. The fruit gleams at them from the topmost branches of art, but they lack the ladder, the courage, the grip to venture so high. In himself a Phidias is quite possible as a poet, but, if modern strength be taken into consideration, almost solely in the sense that to God nothing is impossible. The desire for a poetical Claude Lorrain is already an immodesty at present, however earnestly one man's heart may yearn for such a consummation.—The presentment of the highest man, the most simple and at the same time the most complete, has hitherto been beyond the scope of all artists. Perhaps, however, the Greeks, in the ideal of Athene, saw farther than any men did before or after their time.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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11c. 1872 AD
Faith makes Holy and Condemns.—A Christian who happened upon forbidden paths of thought might well ask himself on some occasion whether it is really necessary that there should be a God, side by side with a representative Lamb, if faith in the existence of these beings suffices to produce the same influences? If they do exist after all, are they not superfluous beings? For all that is given by the Christian religion to the human soul, all that is beneficent, consoling, and edifying, just as much as all that depresses and crushes, emanates from that faith and not from the objects of that faith. It is here as in another well-known case—there were indeed no witches, but the terrible effects of the belief in witches were the same as if they really had existed. For all occasions where the Christian awaits the immediate intervention of a God, though in vain (for there is no God), his religion is inventive enough to find subterfuges and reasons for tranquillity. In so far Christianity is an ingenious religion.—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 / quote
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12c. 1872 AD
Party Tactics.—When a party observes that a previous member has changed from an unqualified to a qualified adherent, it endures it so ill that it irritates and mortifies him in every possible way with the object of forcing him to a decisive break and making him an opponent. For the party suspects that the intention of finding a relative value in its faith, a value which admits of pro and con, of weighing and discarding, is more dangerous than downright opposition.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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14c. 1872 AD
The Fundamental Errors.—A man cannot feel any psychical pleasure or pain unless he is swayed by one of two illusions. Either he believes in the identity of certain facts, certain sensations, and in that case finds spiritual pleasure and pain in comparing present with past conditions and in noting their similarity or difference (as is invariably the case with recollection); or he believes in the freedom of the will, perhaps when he reflects, “I ought not to have done this,” “This might have turned out differently,” and from these reflections likewise he derives pleasure and pain. Without the errors that are rife in every psychical pain and pleasure, humanity would never have developed. For the root idea of humanity is that man is free in a world of bondage—man, the eternal wonder-worker, whether his deeds be good or evil—man, the amazing exception, the super-beast, the quasi-God, the mind of creation, the indispensable, the key-word to the cosmic riddle, the mighty lord of nature and despiser of nature, the creature that calls its history “the history of the world”! Vanitas vanitatum homo.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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15c. 1872 AD
The Sum-Total of Conscience.—The sum-total of our conscience is all that has regularly been demanded of us, without reason, in the days of our childhood, by people whom we respected or feared. From conscience comes that feeling of obligation (“This I must do, this omit”) which does not ask, Why must I?—In all cases where a thing is done with “because” and “why,” man acts without conscience, but not necessarily on that account against conscience.—The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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18c. 1872 AD
Divine Missionaries.—Even Socrates feels himself to be a divine missionary, but I am not sure whether we should not here detect a tincture of that Attic irony and fondness for jesting whereby this odious, arrogant conception would be toned down. He talks of the fact without unction—his images of the gadfly and the horse are simple and not sacerdotal. The real religious task which he has set himself—to test God in a hundred ways and see whether he spoke the truth—betrays a bold and free attitude, in which the missionary walked by the side of his God. This testing of God is one of the most subtle compromises between piety and free-thinking that has ever been devised.—Nowadays we do not even need this compromise any longer.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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19c. 1872 AD
Prayer.—On two hypotheses alone is there any sense in prayer, that not quite extinct custom of olden times. It would have to be possible either to fix or alter the will of the godhead, and the devotee would have to know best himself what he needs and should really desire. Both hypotheses, axiomatic and traditional in all other religions, are denied by Christianity. If Christianity nevertheless maintained prayer side by side with its belief in the all-wise and all-provident divine reason (a belief that makes prayer really senseless and even blasphemous), it showed here once more its admirable “wisdom of the serpent.” For an outspoken command, “Thou shalt not pray,” would have led Christians by way of boredom to the denial of Christianity. In the Christian ora et labora ora plays the rôle of pleasure. Without ora what could those unlucky saints who renounced labora have done? But to have a chat with God, to ask him for all kinds of pleasant things, to feel a slight amusement at one's own folly in still having any wishes at all, in spite of so excellent a father—all that was an admirable invention for saints.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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20c. 1872 AD
The Danger in Personality.—The more God has been regarded as a personality in himself, the less loyal have we been to him. Men are far more attached to their thought-images than to their best beloved. That is why they sacrifice themselves for State, Church, and even for God—so far as he remains their creation, their thought, and is not too much looked upon as a personality. In the latter case they almost always quarrel with him. After all, it was the most pious of men who let slip that bitter cry: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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21c. 1872 AD
Worldly Justice.—It is possible to unhinge worldly justice with the doctrine of the complete non-responsibility and innocence of every man. An attempt has been made in the same direction on the basis of the opposite doctrine of the full responsibility and guilt of every man. It was the founder of Christianity who wished to abolish worldly justice and banish judgment and punishment from the world. For he understood all guilt as “sin”—that is, an outrage against God and not against the world. On the other hand, he considered every man in a broad sense, and almost in every sense, a sinner. The guilty, however, are not to be the judges of their peers—so his rules of equity decided. Thus all dispensers of worldly justice were in his eyes as culpable as those they condemned, and their air of guiltlessness appeared to him hypocritical and pharisaical. Moreover, he looked to the motives and not to the results of actions, and thought that only one was keen-sighted enough to give a verdict on motives—himself or, as he expressed it, God.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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22c. 1872 AD
The Persecutors of God.—Paul conceived and Calvin followed up the idea that countless creatures have been predestined to damnation from time immemorial, and that this fair world was made in order that the glory of God might be manifested therein. So heaven and hell and mankind merely exist to satisfy the vanity of God! What a cruel, insatiable vanity must have smouldered in the soul of the first or second thinker of such a thought!—Paul, then, after all, remained Saul—the persecutor of God.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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23c. 1872 AD
Sebastian Bach.—In so far as we do not hear Bach's music as perfect and experienced connoisseurs of counterpoint and all the varieties of the fugal style (and accordingly must dispense with real artistic enjoyment), we shall feel in listening to his music—in Goethe's magnificent phrase—as if “we were present at God's creation of the world.” In other words, we feel here that something great is in the making but not yet made—our mighty modern music, which by conquering nationalities, the Church, and counterpoint has conquered the world. In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism. He stands on the threshold of modern European music, but turns from thence to look at the Middle Ages.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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