Quotes by "Max Stirner"

The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

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. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.

Entitled or unentitled — that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.

The egoist, turning against the demands and concepts of the present, executes pitilessly the most measureless — desecration. Nothing is holy to him! It would be foolish to assert 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 out friend and be humble toward it.

So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarrassed by relations to the world — and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly — so long he is not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world and corporeality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the Skeptical culture presents him — so altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling in ruins would not move him — before he could feel himself as worldless; i.e., a spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients: the man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as spirit. Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he all in all to himself, is he only for himself, i.e. he is spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer language, he cares only for the spiritual.

I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

God cares only for what is his, busies himself with only himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes...He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--A purely egoistic cause.

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.

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.

He who must expend his life to prolong life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does not have it and can as little enjoy it.

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.

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.

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.

Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.