The marketplace crowd are unbelievers; they laugh. Has God got lost? Emigrated? The madman fixes them with his eyes: “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers… Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?… God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
He falls silent, throws down his lantern: “I have come too early… This tremendous event is still on its way.”
Lines to Remember
1 quotationsGod is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getödtet!
Context & when to use it
The madman in the marketplace — not a triumphant atheist, but a horrified witness to a cultural catastrophe.
For secularization and its consequences. Quote the whole — it is a lament, not a boast.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsThe Death of God
Nietzsche’s announcement that belief in God has become unbelievable — and that with Him the foundations of Western morality have gone.
A Confession
Tolstoy’s account of his mid-life crisis — at the height of fame he could not answer “why live?” and nearly killed himself, until he found meaning in the faith of simple people.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche’s prophetic prose-poem — Zarathustra descends from his mountain to teach the Übermensch, the will to power and eternal recurrence.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
German critic of the Enlightenment who sparked the Pantheism Controversy and gave philosophy the word “nihilism”.
Ivan Karamazov
The rational, tormented middle brother who “returns his ticket” to God’s world and authors the Grand Inquisitor — and whose idea that “everything is permitted” kills his father.
Alexei Kirillov
The engineer in Demons who reasons that if God does not exist, man must become God — and that the supreme act of self-will is suicide.