49 quotes
Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest.
A people cannot be free otherwise than at the individual's expense; for it is not the individual that is the main point in this liberty, but the people. The freer the people, the more bound the individual; the Athenian people, precisely at its freest time, created ostracism, banished the atheists, poisoned the most honest thinker.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
If religion has put forward the proposition that we are all of us sinners, I set another against it: we are all of us perfect! Because, in each moment, we are all we can be, and never need to be more.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
I love men too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,—to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern.
The False Principle of our Education (1842)
The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is — unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
History seeks for man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are — terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who are in that respect more even than humanists or realists.
The False Principle of our Education (1842)
A word of honour, an oath, is one only for him whom I entitle to receive it; he who forces me to it obtains only a forced, a hostile word, the word of a foe, whom one has no right to trust; for the foe does not give us the right.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, this in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes a strange impenetrable object a barrier and a hindrance to his self-knowledge.
The False Principle of our Education (1842)
Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.
The False Principle of our Education (1842)
If a concept lacks an essence, nothing will ever be found that completely fits that concept. If you are lacking in the concept of human being, it will immediately expose that you are something individual, something that cannot be expressed by the term human being, thus, in every instance, an individual human being.
Stirner's Critics (1845)
[...] Because the Egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the state except: "Get out of my sunshine!"
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)