Wolf > Wolf's Quotes

“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“Asking the question of being is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the awakening of spirit and hence for an originary world of historical Dasein. It is indispensable if the peril of world-darkening [Weltverdüsterung] is to be forestalled and if our Volk at the center of the West is to take on its historical mission.”
― Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

“Here, the asking of the question who we are is in fact more dangerous than any other opposition found at the same level of certainty about man (the final form of Marxism, which has essentially nothing to do with either Judaism or even with Russia; if somewhere a non-developed spiritualism is still slumbering, it is in the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally Western; it is a European possibility: the emergence of the masses, industry, technology, the extinction of Christianity; but inasmuch as the dominance of reason as an equalizing of everyone is but the consequence of Christianity and as the latter is fundamentally of Jewish origin (cf. Nietzsche's thought on the slave revolt with respect to morality), Bolshevism is in fact Jewish; but then Christianity is also fundamentally Bolshevist! And what are the decisions that become necessary on that basis?). But the danger of the question "Who are we?" is at the same time--if danger can necessitate what is highest--the sole path by which to succeed in coming to ourselves and thus in initiating the original salvation, that is, the justification of the Occident on the basis of its history. The danger of this question is in itself so essential for us that it loses the appearance of opposition to the new German will.”
― Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)

“The spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kenntnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Self-Assertion of the German University

“There is much talk nowadays of blood and soil [Blut und Boden] as frequently invoked powers. Literati, whom one comes across even today, have already seized hold of them. Blood and soil are certainly powerful and necessary, but they are not a sufficient condition for the Dasein of a people.”
― Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit

“But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.
Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.
But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Self-Assertion of the German University

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.”
― Vilfredo Pareto

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. Proud and terrible king, he needs everything and nothing resists him ... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses ... And who in all of this will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man ... So it is accomplished ... the first law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision

“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“War is progress, peace is stagnation”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.”
― Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel

“Trench fighting is the bloodiest, wildest, most brutal of all ... Of all the war's exciting moments none is so powerful as the meeting of two storm troop leaders between narrow trench walls. There's no mercy there, no going back, the blood speaks from a shrill cry of recognition that tears itself from one's breast like a nightmare.”
― Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

“Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time ... There now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“And then came a damp, cold night in Flanders, through which we marched in silence, and when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads, and with a sharp report sent the little pellets flying between our ranks, ripping up the wet ground; but even before the little cloud had passed, from two hundred throats the first hurrah rose to meet the first messenger of death. Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began, and with feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly past turnip fields and hedges the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company, and just as Death plunged a busy hand into our ranks, the song reached us too and we passed it along: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt!”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf