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.
We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
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.
Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns – they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
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.
What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
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.
Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
God sinks into dust before man.
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.”
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.
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”.
Liberty of the people is not my liberty!
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.
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.
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?