129 Quotes by Max Stirner

The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth’s service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. “The truth” outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself.

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.

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.

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.

The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.

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.

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.

To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled.

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.”