Max Stirner Quotes

Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause. ~ Max Stirner

The fixed idea may also be perceived as 'maxim', 'principle', 'standpoint', and the like. Archimedes,86 to move the earth, asked for a standpoint outside it. Men sought continually for this standpoint, and every one seized upon it as well as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the world oj mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences; it is heaven. Heaven is the 'standpoint' from which the earth is moved, earthly doings surveyed and - despised. To assure to themselves heaven, to occupy the heavenly standpoint firmly and for ever - how painfully and tirelessly humanity struggled for this! ~ Max Stirner

The people is dead! Good-day, Self! ~ Max Stirner

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter. ~ Max Stirner

Political liberty, what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual's independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual's subjection in the State and to the State's laws ... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery. ~ Max Stirner

The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the 'immoral' man. 'He who is not moral is immoral!' and accordingly reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist. ~ Max Stirner

When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks "if I only have my dear life," he does not apply his full strength to using, i. e., enjoying, life. ~ Max Stirner

The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime". ~ Max Stirner

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." ~ Max Stirner

For only he who is alive is in the right. ~ Max Stirner

The true human being doesn't lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present, existing and actual. However and whoever I may be, joyful and sorrowful, a child or an old man, in confidence or doubt, asleep or awake, I am it. I am the true human being. ~ Max Stirner

The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it, i.e. model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the world according to his interest, not according to his ideals, becomes confirmed. ~ Max Stirner

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. ~ Max Stirner

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end? ~ Max Stirner

No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. ~ Max Stirner

Before the sacred, people lost all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience. ~ Max Stirner

Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by appetites. ~ Max Stirner

Atheists are pious people. ~ Max Stirner

From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world, a man seeks to find out himself and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture. ~ Max Stirner

A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists. ~ Max Stirner

Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, aweapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding. ~ Max Stirner

Our whole education system is calculated to produce *feelings* in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out ... Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are 'pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims,eternal principles. ~ Max Stirner

For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy. ~ Max Stirner

Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist). ~ Max Stirner

Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken. ~ Max Stirner

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. ~ Max Stirner

Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with "religious and orthodox philosophy", "constitutional monarchy", "the Christian state", "freedom with certain limits", or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed. ~ Max Stirner

If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more. ~ Max Stirner

All things are Nothing to Me ~ Max Stirner

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." I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them. ~ Max Stirner

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! ~ Max Stirner

People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me. ~ Max Stirner

If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. ~ Max Stirner

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss. ~ Max Stirner

When the government designates as punishable all play of mind against the state, the moderate liberals come and opine that fun, satire, wit, humor, etc., must have free play anyhow, and genius must enjoy freedom. So not the individual man indeed, but still genius, is to be free. Here the state, or in its name the government, says with perfect right: He who is not for me is against me. ~ Max Stirner

Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction. ~ Max Stirner

He who is infatuated with 'Man' leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook. ~ Max Stirner

Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary! One may even call it an article of fashion in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that, if it cost too much in solid material, people adorn themselves with its counterfeit tinsel and feign it. ~ Max Stirner

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him. ~ Max Stirner

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State. ~ Max Stirner

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property. ~ Max Stirner

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. ~ Max Stirner

Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many. ~ Max Stirner

When every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied ... His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other. ~ Max Stirner

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.' ~ Max Stirner

The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom. ~ Max Stirner

Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space? ~ Max Stirner

Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on institutions ~ Max Stirner

The people's good fortune is my misfortune! ~ Max Stirner

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age. ~ Max Stirner

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake? ~ Max Stirner

It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation - that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness. ~ Max Stirner

Nothing is more to me than myself. ~ Max Stirner

Then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person. ~ Max Stirner

Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality. ~ Max Stirner

Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man. ~ Max Stirner

You call me the unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am - for you; but I am so only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their 'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not - unique.[102] But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me: consequently - adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish, but the egoistic as the - unique. ~ Max Stirner

Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom 'good maxims' have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in. ~ Max Stirner

We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart. ~ Max Stirner

What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing. ~ Max Stirner

[M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take. ~ Emma Goldman

Our athiests are pious people. ~ Max Stirner

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth! ~ Max Stirner

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! ~ Max Stirner

Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority. ~ Max Stirner

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 every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently,do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others ... He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair. ~ Max Stirner

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of. ~ Max Stirner

I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property! ~ Max Stirner

My basic political posture is "what a shame the human race did this to earth." What we have done environmentally, politically, culturally. ~ Max Weinberg

[...] but personally if I never drink another crocodile pee I shall be a happy man.'
'Crocodile pee?'
'I always assumed that that was the main ingredient in Gatorade, but I may be wrong. ~ M.J. Trow

Sometimes people get taken away from you whether you want it or not. And sometimes that hurts so much, it might be easier to forget. ~ Cassandra Clare

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development. ~ Max Ernst

As a general rule, whenever guys have problems approaching girls, it's because they're afraid of rejection or they're afraid of something specific. The way that you get over a fear like that is you figure out what the worst is that can happen. ~ Tucker Max

We're all crazy and the only difference between patients and their therapists is the therapists haven't been caught yet. ~ Max Walker

There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go. ~ Max Beerbohm

Max?" said the Gasman. "Are those, um, rats?"
Lovely. "Yes, those do appear to be either rats or mice on steroids," I said briskly, trying not to shriek and climb the walls like a girly-girl. ~ James Patterson

A few songs with Him might change the way you sing. Forever. ~ Max Lucado

The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, laden with foreboding.
----
Max Payne 1 ~ Sam Lake

It wasn't perfect, but it would do for a few seconds, long enough to hole up and wait for the shooting to die down. Only it didn't. Pistols, shotguns, and that clatter you never forget, the kind that tells you someone has a Kalashnikov. ~ Max Brooks

Water helped ancient man learn those first lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society ... It became part of the moral and mental legacy parents passed on to their children. ~ Max Meyer

With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left ... Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood. ~ Max Horkheimer

The Lord is near to all who call upon Him. Psalm 145:18 ~ Max Lucado

A hero," Max said.
"A weirdness-haunted victim of circumstance who spends his days looking for things."
Max grinned. "That's what I just said. ~ Tom Holt

The difference between a bad programmer and a good programmer is understanding. That is, bad programmers don't understand what they are doing and good programmers do. - Max Kanat-Alexander ~ Steve Fenton

In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to a human being with his skin removed. ~ Erik Larson

I've never been surprised by God's judgment, but I'm still stunned by His grace. ~ Max Lucado

Faces in the everyday impress us as hives of subtlety. That impression must be sharpened in photography, which discloses only a microsecond of the face's behaviour, immersed in a social process. ~ Max Kozloff

Change is inevitable, progress is not. ~ Max McKeown

Man is a venerating animal. He venerates as easily as he purges himself. When they take away from him the gods of his fathers, he looks for others abroad. ~ Max Jacob

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast. ~ Max Muller

It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls. ~ Max Planck

No one wants to read a story where I saw a cute puppy on the street and I petted it. I mean, that's not funny. I only write about the funny stuff. ~ Tucker Max

We need to remember that the first disciples were ordinary men called to an extraordinary mission. Their devotion to Jesus outweighed- by hair- their fears and insecurities. As a result God change them and use them to accomplish some mind-boggling things. Why couldn't God - why wouldn't God do the same in your life? ~ Max Lucado

We venture to make the assertion that there is but one sin: IGNORANCE, and but one salvation: APPLIED KNOWLEDGE. ~ Max Heindel

Blood pressure check!" The doorknob rattled, as if the nurse were intending just to walk in, but the lock held, thank God. The nurse knocked again.
"Oh, shit," Gina breathed, laughing as she scrambled off of him. She reached to remove the condom they'd just used, encountered . . . him, and met his eyes. But then she scooped her clothes off the floor and ran into the bathroom.
"Mr. Bhagat?" The nurse knocked on the door again. Even louder this time. "Are you all right?"
Oh, shit, indeed. "Come in," Max called as he pulled up the blanket and leaned on the button that put his bed back up into a sitting position. The same control device had a "call nurse" button as well as the clearly marked one that would unlock the door.
"It's locked," the nurse called back, as well he knew.
"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, as he wiped off his face with the edge of the sheet. Sweat much in bed, all alone, Mr. Bhagat? "I must've . . . Here, let me figure out how to . . ." He took an extra second to smooth his hair, his pajama top, and then, praying that the nurse had a cold and couldn't smell the scent of sex that lingered in the air, he hit the release.
"Please don't lock your door during the day," the woman scolded him as she came into the room, around to the side of his bed. It was Debra Forsythe, a woman around his age, whom Max had met briefly at his check-in. She had been on her way home to deal with some crisis with her kids, and hadn't been happy then, either. "And ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Nobody gets to pick their time to die, but living every day to the max is something we all get to do. ~ Lurlene McDaniel

I think it'd be pretty unrealistic to think we're the only planet in the world with thinking beings. It's kind of a strange conceit. Especially given how many universes there must be. ~ Max Minghella

Latin America and the Caribbean are the happiest on average in the world. ~ Max Fisher

Indeed, baptism is a vow, a sacred vow of the believer to follow Christ. Just as a wedding celebrates the fusion of two hearts, baptism celebrates the union of sinner with Savior. ~ Max Lucado

I was doing illustration work, and the cartooning slowly took over. ~ Max Cannon