"Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?"
About this Quote
Nietzsche turns devotion inside out and dares you to call it blasphemy. The opening move, "Today I love myself as I love my god", is not a self-help slogan but a lit fuse: he collapses the distance between worship and self-regard, then challenges the moral police to prove jurisdiction. "Who could charge me with a sin today?" is courtroom language, implying that guilt is less a metaphysical fact than a social technology-one that requires prosecutors, norms, and a shared statute book.
The subtext is pure Nietzsche: sin only exists inside a theological economy, and he is busy bankrupting it. "I know only sins against my god" sounds pious until the trapdoor opens: "but who knows my god?" If no one can name the deity, no one can enforce the code. He replaces the communal God of doctrine with a private, self-authored divinity-a provocation aimed at Christianity's claim to universal moral authority.
Context matters. Nietzsche is writing in the long shadow of "God is dead": not a triumphant atheist punchline, but a diagnosis that the old moral certainties are losing their credibility in modern Europe. When shared belief decays, inherited guilt starts to look arbitrary. This line stages the aftermath: a person experimenting with sovereignty, trying on an ethics that answers to an inward standard rather than a public altar.
It works because it is both confession and taunt. He doesn't argue; he performs the sensation of moral escape-then exposes its cost: once your god is unshareable, your innocence is unprovable, too.
The subtext is pure Nietzsche: sin only exists inside a theological economy, and he is busy bankrupting it. "I know only sins against my god" sounds pious until the trapdoor opens: "but who knows my god?" If no one can name the deity, no one can enforce the code. He replaces the communal God of doctrine with a private, self-authored divinity-a provocation aimed at Christianity's claim to universal moral authority.
Context matters. Nietzsche is writing in the long shadow of "God is dead": not a triumphant atheist punchline, but a diagnosis that the old moral certainties are losing their credibility in modern Europe. When shared belief decays, inherited guilt starts to look arbitrary. This line stages the aftermath: a person experimenting with sovereignty, trying on an ethics that answers to an inward standard rather than a public altar.
It works because it is both confession and taunt. He doesn't argue; he performs the sensation of moral escape-then exposes its cost: once your god is unshareable, your innocence is unprovable, too.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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