Johan > Johan's Quotes

“A weakling is incapable of sincerity.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Behavioral science is not for sissies.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“We must realize that war is universal and strife is justice, and that all things come into the world and pass away through strife.”
― Heraclitus

“Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep.”
― Heraclitus

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

“All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“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. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own