Quote

Before what is sacred, people lose 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 my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee in short, by my conscience.

Max Stirner

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Max Stirner
Age: 49 †
Born: 1806
Born: October 25
Died: 1856
Died: June 26
Educator
Journalist
Philosopher
Professor Of Philosophy
Translator
Writer
Johann Kaspar Schmidt
People
Toward
Declaration
Short
Knees
Lose
Humble
Attitude
Sacred
Bending
Loses
Conscience
Declaring
Sense
Atheism
Knee
Power
Confidence
Occupy
Thing
Judgment
Powerless

More quotes by Max Stirner

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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.
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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).
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Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
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In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud—crime, doesn't it rumble in the distant thunder, and don't you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?
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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.
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Religion itself is without genius. There is no religious genius and no one would be permitted to distinguish between the talented and the untalented in religion.
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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!
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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.
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Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
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We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.
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Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
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The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Max Stirner