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Max Stirner citations

Johann Kaspar Schmidt dit Max Stirner, né le 25 octobre 1806 à Bayreuth et mort le 26 juin 1856 à Berlin, est un philosophe allemand appartenant aux Jeunes hégéliens, considéré comme un des précurseurs de l'existentialisme et de l'anarchisme individualiste.

Il est l'auteur, en 1844, de L'Unique et sa propriété, livre qui connaît un grand retentissement à sa sortie, avant de tomber assez vite dans l'oubli.

Sa philosophie est un réquisitoire contre toutes les puissances supérieures auxquelles on aliène son « Moi », et Stirner vise principalement l'Esprit hégélien, l'Homme feuerbachien et la Révolution socialiste. Stirner exhorte chacun à s'approprier ce qui est en son pouvoir, indépendamment des diverses forces d'oppression extérieures au Moi.

✵ 25. octobre 1806 – 26. juin 1856
Max Stirner photo

Œuvres

L'Unique et sa propriété
Max Stirner: 55   citations 0   J'aime

Max Stirner citations célèbres

“Le fanatisme est spécialement propre aux gens cultivés, car la culture d'un homme est en raison de l'intérêt qu'il attache aux choses de l'esprit, et cet intérêt spirituel, s'il est fort et vivace, n'est et ne peut être que fanatisme; c'est un intérêt fanatique pour ce qui est sacré.”

Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

L'Unique et sa propriété, 1844

“On entend aujourd’hui de nouveau l’éloge du « sérieux », « ce sérieux qu’exigent les sujets et actions de haute importance ». Ce genre de gravité exprime clairement combien vieilles et graves sont devenues la folie et l’obsession. Car il n’y a rien de plus sérieux que le fou quand il en vient au point essentiel de sa folie; devant l’objet de son zèle, il n’entend plus raillerie.”

Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

L'Unique et sa propriété, 1844

“Les travailleurs ont en mains la puissance la plus formidable et, s'ils en prenaient une fois véritablement conscience et l'employaient, rien ne pourrait leur résister : ils n'auraient qu'à arrêter le travail, considérer les produits de leur travail comme leurs et en jouir.”

Max Stirner

, 1844

“Je vois des hommes plongés dans les ténèbres de la superstition, harcelés par un essaim de fantômes. Si je cherche, dans la mesure de mes forces à projeter la lumière du jour sur ces apparitions de la nuit, croyez-vous que j'obéisse à mon amour pour vous? J'écris peut-être par amour pour les hommes? Eh non! j'écris parce que je veux faire à des idées qui sont mes idées une place dans le monde […] Faites-en ce que vous voudrez, c'est votre affaire et je ne m'en inquiète pas […] Non seulement ce n'est pas pour l'amour de vous j'exprime ce que je pense, mais ce n'est pas même pour l'amour de la vérité.”

Max Stirner

Max Stirner: Citations en anglais

“The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime.””

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
As quoted in The Great Quotations (1960) by George Seldes, p. 664
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“All things are Nothing to Me”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Source: The Ego and Its Own

“Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection [Empörung] leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 421
The Ego and Its Own (1844)
Contexte: Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection [Empörung] leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on “institutions.”

“What is not supposed to be my concern!”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 5
The Ego and Its Own (1844)
Contexte: What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!"

“The divine is God's concern; the human, man's.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 7
The Ego and Its Own (1844)
Contexte: 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!

“Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.”

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Max Stirner

As quoted in Forbes Vol. 78 (1956), and in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 275
Contexte: 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.

“Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 25

“Liberty of the people is not my liberty!”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 190
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who are in that respect more even than humanists or realists.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Wollen wir etwa die Pädagogik den Philosophen in die Hände spielen? Nichts weniger als das! Sie würden sich ungeschickt genug benehmen. Denen allein werde sie anvertraut, die mehr sind als Philosophen, darum aber auch unendlich mehr als Humanisten oder Realisten.
Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

“I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and … only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Ich setze Mich nicht voraus, weil Ich Mich jeden Augenblick überhaupt erst setze oder schaffe, und nur dadurch Ich bin, dass Ich nicht vorausgesetzt, sondern gesetzt bin, und wiederum nur in dem Moment gesetzt, wo ich mich setze, d.h. Ich bin Schöpfer un Geschöpf in Einem.
Cambridge 1995, p. 135
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man ‘entitles’ him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the ‘sanctuary of his inner nature’ (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my — might.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 219
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 296, 297
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. […] He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

New York 1907, p. 187
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, … without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,—so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them—lays hands on the sacred!”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 44
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only "useful citizens" out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people. Our good background of recalcitrancy [sic] gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school is then philistinism.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 23

“[…] 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.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 28

“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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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 162
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are there, they are there in spite of school.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 21

“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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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 163
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“"Freedom" awakens your rage against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 163
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, pp. 61-62
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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?”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 56
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 242
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,—to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 22

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

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 182
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 237
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 23

“Whether nature gives me a right, or whether God, the people's choice, etc., does so, all of that is the same foreign right, a right that I do not give or take to myself. Thus the Communists say, equal labour entitles man to equal enjoyment. […] No, equal labour does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But, if you have laboured and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then – ‘it serves you right.’ If you take the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a, ‘well-earned right’ of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is their right, as by laying hands on it would become your right.”

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Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 170, 171
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behavior, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust of the school.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 22

“If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.”

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Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 23

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