1. Citations
  2. Auteurs
  3. Max Stirner

Max Stirner citations
Page 2

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
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

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

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 236
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of — lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; — are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

New York 1907, p. 54, 55
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 192
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. […] His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 108
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 12

“[…] Because the Egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the state except: "Get out of my sunshine!"”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Tucker 1907, p. 307
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one. […] Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? […] Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 11

“The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 114
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 383
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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?”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Cambridge 1995, p. 6
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

“The tiger that assails me is in the right, and I who strike him down am also in the right. I defend against him not my right, but myself.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 191
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“If a concept lacks an essence, nothing will ever be found that completely fits that concept. If you are lacking in the concept of human being, it will immediately expose that you are something individual, something that cannot be expressed by the term human being, thus, in every instance, an individual human being.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner

Stirner's Critics (1845)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 184
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit "which builds its own body."”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

Dover 2005, p. 79
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

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

“I am owner of my might, and I am so when I now myself as unique.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre L'Unique et sa propriété

In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me.
Dover 2005, p. 366
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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner livre The False Principle of our Education

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Max Stirner

Attributed in Forbes Vol 38 Iss. 2 (1936) p. 18, and in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 275

Auteurs similaires

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 12
philosophe allemand
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Arthur Schopenhauer 18
philosophe allemand
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Friedrich Nietzsche 104
philologue, philosophe et poète allemand
Friedrich Engels photo
Friedrich Engels 25
philosophe allemand et théoricien socialiste
Karl Marx photo
Karl Marx 69
philosophe, sociologue et économiste allemand
Richard Wagner photo
Richard Wagner 6
Compositeur allemand de la période romantique
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon photo
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 10
polémiste, journaliste, économiste, philosophe et sociologu…
Émile Durkheim photo
Émile Durkheim 13
sociologue français
Fedor Dostoïevski photo
Fedor Dostoïevski 13
écrivain russe
Honoré de Balzac photo
Honoré de Balzac 193
romancier, critique littéraire, essayiste, journaliste et é…