Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (German Philosopher)

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) was a German philosopher of the Enlightenment. A foremost critic of rationalism, particularly as championed by Baruch Spinoza, Jacobi emphasized the philosophic dimensions of feeling (“Gefühlsphilosophie”) and faith in opposition to the claims of pure reason.

Born in Düsseldorf, Jacobi became privy councilor at the Bavarian court in 1779. He was a friend of the philosophers Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Jacobi was a prominent early critic of Immanuel Kant and wrote Über das Unternehmen des Kritizismus (1797; On the Enterprise of Criticism.) Jacobi was also a critic of the Enlightenment overall, which he judged led only to atheism and nihilism (a phrase he coined.) He held that common empirical or scientific reasoning did no more than amassing observed facts; it cannot touch the essential nature of things, which is given by revelation or faith.

Jacobi had a celebrated dispute (“Pantheismusstreit”) with Moses Mendelssohn over the question of Lessing’s adherence to Spinozism. When Jacobi met Lessing, who declared he knew only the philosophy of Spinoza, Jacobi began to study Spinozism. Finding its rationalistic attitude repulsive, he denounced it in Über die Lehre des Spinoza, in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (1785; On the Teachings of Spinoza, in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn.) With other Enlightenment thinkers, Mendelssohn confronted Jacobi’s concept of belief as obscurantist. Jacobi retorted in David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (1787; David Hume on Belief, or Idealism and Realism,) establishing his concept of belief to be no different from that supported by Hume and other philosophers.

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As a countenance is made beautiful by the soul’s shining through it, so the world is beautified by the shining through it of God.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: God

To lay aside all prejudices, is to lay aside all principles.—He who is destitute of principles is governed by whims.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Prejudice

In one thing men of all ages are alike: they have believed obstinately in themselves.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

I have all reverence for principles which grow out of sentiments; but as to sentiments which grow out of principles, you shall scarcely build a house of cards thereon.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Principles

I have never found a thorough, pervading, enduring morality but in those who feared God.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Morality

Manage as we may misery and suffering will always cleave to the border of superfluity.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

There are but two religions,—Christianity and paganism, the worship of God and idolatry. A third between these is not possible. Where idolatry ends, there Christianity begins; and where idolatry begins, there Christianity ends.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Religion

It is not truth, justice, liberty, that men seek; they seek only themselves.—And oh, that they knew how to seek themselves aright!
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Selfishness

Every great example takes hold of us with the authority of a miracle, and says to us, “If ye had but faith, ye, also, could do the same things.”
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Example

What is there in man so worthy of honor and reverence as this, that he is capable of contemplating something higher than his own reason, more sublime than the whole universe—that Spirit which alone is self-subsistent, from which all truth proceeds, without which is no truth?
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

It is never too late with us, so long as we are aware of our faults and bear them impatiently.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Topics: Repentance

We always live prospectively, never retrospectively, and there is no abiding moment.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

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