36 quotes
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)
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)
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)
[...] 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)
Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for 'one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right'. You long for freedom? You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself. See, he who has might 'stands above the law'. How does this prospect taste to you, you 'law-abiding' people? But you have no taste!
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!"
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
Where the world comes in my way — and it comes in my way everywhere — I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but — my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)
Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honoured under the name of the 'highest' or être suprême, and trample in the dust one 'proof of his existence' after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new.
The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)