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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
Power
Confidence
Occupy
Thing
Judgment
Powerless
People
Toward
Declaration
Short
Knees
Lose
Humble
Attitude
Sacred
Bending
Loses
Conscience
Declaring
Sense
Atheism
Knee

More quotes by Max Stirner

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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.
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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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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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Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
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We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
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A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
Max Stirner
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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.
Max Stirner
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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?
Max Stirner