Ernst Junger Quotes

#1. As long as we have a youth that stands for all that is strong and manly our future is assured.

Ernst Junger

#2. A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.

Ernst Junger

#3. I had always been man enough to ruin myself without help.

Ernst Junger

#4. One of the anarch's emoluments is that he is distinguished for things that he has done on the side or that go against his grain.

Ernst Junger

#5. The more the panic grows, the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.

Ernst Junger

#6. Freedom is based on the anarch's awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around; it accompanies him like a shadow that he can conjure up. A leap from this bridge will set me free.

Ernst Junger

#7. In my experience, I have found that creativity demands a vigilant mind, which is weakened by the influence of drugs.

Ernst Junger

#8. Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

Ernst Junger

#9. The ship founders on a sandbank and then gets back afloat. Electric power stops; after a while, the machines start up again. During such recesses, the anarch measures his own strength and autonomy.

Ernst Junger

#10. Chivalry here took a final farewell. It had to yield to the heightened intensity of war, just as all fine and personal feeling has to yield when machinery gets the upper hand. The Europe of today appeared here for the first time on the field of battle.

Ernst Junger

#11. The moment we give in, no machine in the world can help us. But as long as we do not lose the feeling that calls out to every valiant man, 'You are born to rule,' we shall always know how to create the best instruments of power of our time.

Ernst Junger

#12. What does Nietzsche say of fighting men? 'You must have as enemies only those whom you hate, but not those whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy, and then the enemy's success is your success also.

Ernst Junger

#13. Economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake.

Ernst Junger

#14. Seen politically, systems follow one another, each consuming the previous one. They live on ever-bequeathed and ever-disappointed hope, which never entirely fades. Its spark is all that survives, as it eats its way along the blasting fuse. For this spark, history is merely an occasion, never a goal.

Ernst Junger

#15. Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.

Ernst Junger

#16. I could not bank on the phlegmatic Chinese; I would have to take care of it myself. This would be safer and also consistent with my own responsibility. The latter is the anarch's ultimate authority.

Ernst Junger

#17. The hooting of the owl with its tender wing is more familiar to me than the crowing of the cock. I prefer the strings to the woodwinds. Intermission: that is the darkness. The light feels like a vague scratching; it is malaise rather than pain. I am glad to sink back into darkness.

Ernst Junger

#18. The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I 'ultimately' do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer

Ernst Junger

#19. In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit.

Ernst Junger

#20. The lazy flesh disappeared. Our muscles became hard as steel, refined on the anvil of an experienced blacksmith. Even our faces changed. Among other things, we learned to ride, to fence, to take a fall. And these we learned for life.

Ernst Junger

#21. The pretensioms of the other side may be even better grounded then ours. That is a matter of indifference. For it is not justification that turns the scale, but the stronger and more deeply realized will to power.

Ernst Junger

#22. The anarch nurtures no expectations. He stakes on no one but himself. Basically, people remain pied pipers, whatever melodies they play to introduce themselves. And as for the rats - that is a chapter unto itself.

Ernst Junger

#23. Often I have the impression that I am writing on paper that is already browning in the licks of the flames.

Ernst Junger

#24. I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness.

Ernst Junger

#25. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.

Ernst Junger

#26. I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.

Ernst Junger

#27. The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.

Ernst Junger

#28. We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.

Ernst Junger

#29. To us, too, the machine is something external, something we that we have set up outside ourselves. But it is our indispensable resource, whether in peace or war; and for that reason we endorse it and accept it.

Ernst Junger

#30. He was fleeced, robbed; and yet he was the exploiter. The government, unhesitatingly obliging to the majority, pocketed his taxes, and allowed him to be bled.

Ernst Junger

#31. I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.

Ernst Junger

#32. Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.

Ernst Junger

#33. In this place a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. It intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisable, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed.

Ernst Junger

#34. When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country--and the time will come--then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.

Ernst Junger

#35. The anarch, as I have expounded elsewhere, is the pendant to the monarch; he is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule.

Ernst Junger

#36. A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.

Ernst Junger

#37. Words had lost their meaning; even war was no longer war. Monteron would tum in his grave if he could hear what they called war nowadays. After all, peace was no longer peace.

Ernst Junger

#38. There is only one kind of land reform today: expropriation.

Ernst Junger

#39. Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.

Ernst Junger

#40. When I saw several thugs attack a lone man, or a larger man a small one, or even when a mastiff attacked a toy Pomeranian, not virtue but plain disgust upset my insides. This early variety of defeatism later became an obsolete trait - damaging me in today's world.

Ernst Junger

#41. Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]

Ernst Junger

#42. The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file

Ernst Junger

#43. Belief in these solitary men springs from a longing for a fraternity without name, for a deeper spiritual relationship than is possible between human beings.

Ernst Junger

#44. The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.

Ernst Junger

#45. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time.

Ernst Junger

#46. It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage.

Ernst Junger