60+ Max Stirner Quotes On Individualistic, Anarchic And Egoistic

Max Stirner was a German philosopher of the 19th century who was associated with the philosophical current of individualist anarchism. He is best known for his book The Ego and Its Own, which is considered to be one of the main philosophical works of the anarchist and individualist movements. Stirner's philosophy is often seen as a source of inspiration for nihilism, existentialism, post-structuralism and post-anarchism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Max Stirner on love, individualistic, anarchic.

Top 10 Max Stirner Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Nothing is more to me than myself.
8. The people is dead! Good-day, Self!
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction.
• Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
• We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
• The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
• Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.
• Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
• The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
• Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
• We don't call it sin today, we call it self-expression.
• Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

Max Stirner Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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 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

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

I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them? — Max Stirner

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. — 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

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

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

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag. — 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

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

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

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

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

Crimes spring from fixed ideas. — 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

The people’s good fortune is my misfortune! — Max Stirner

If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves! — Max Stirner

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

Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority. — 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

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

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property. — 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

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. — Max Stirner

Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic. — Max Stirner

God sinks into dust before man. — 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

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? — Max Stirner

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of. — 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

Life Lessons by Max Stirner

Max Stirner's philosophy emphasizes the importance of individualism and self-determination. He believed that all forms of authority, including religion, morality, and the state, should be rejected in favor of self-ownership and personal freedom. His work encourages us to think for ourselves, to be independent, and to take responsibility for our own actions.