Johann Gottlieb Fichte Quotes

“A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.”

“All human strength is acquired through struggle with oneself and overcoming oneself.”

“Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.”

“He who has no means of subsistence, has no duty to acknowledge or respect other people's property, considering that the principles of the social convenant have been violated to his prejudice.”

“I do not know without knowing something. I do not know anything about myself without becoming something for myself through this knowledge – or, which is simply to say the same thing, without separating something subjective in me from something objective.

As soon as consciousness is posited, this separation is posited; without the latter no consciousness whatsoever is possible. Through this very separation, however, the relation of what is subjective and what is objective to each other is also immediately posited. What is objective is supposed to subsist through itself, without any help from what is subjective and independently of it.

What is subjective is supposed to depend on what is objective and to receive its material determination from it alone. Being exists on its own, but knowledge depends on being: the two must appear to us in this way, just as surely as anything at all appears to us, as surely as we possess consciousness.

We thereby obtain the following, important insight: knowledge and being are not separated outside of consciousness and independent of it; instead, they are separated only within consciousness, since this separation is a condition for the possibility of all consciousness, and it is only through this separation that the two of them first arise.

There is no being except by means of consciousness, just as there is, outside of consciousness, no knowing, as a merely subjective reference to a being. I am required to bring about a separation simply in order to be able to say to myself “I”; and yet it is only by saying “I” and only insofar as I say this that such a separation occurs.

The unity [das Eine] that is divided – which thus lies at the basis of all consciousness and due to which what is subjective and what is objective in consciousness are immediately posited as one – is absolute = X, and this can in no way appear within consciousness as something simple.”

“In nearly all the nations of Europe, a powerful, hostile government is growing, and is at war with all the others, and sometimes oppresses the people in dreadful ways: It is Jewry.”

“In one word: through the science of knowledge the spirit of man comes to itself, and from now on rests upon itself, without outside help, and becomes completely master of itself, like the dancer of his feet, or the fencer of his hands.”

“The aim of all government is to make all government superfluous.”

“The human being (and so all finite beings generally) becomes human only among others. Self and other stand in a relation of potential reciprocity.”

“The kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of man one is.”

“The kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is.”

“The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.”

“The majority of men could sooner be brought to believe themselves a piece of lava in the moon than to take themselves for a self.”

“Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.”

“We do not act because we know, but we know because we are destined for action; practical reason is the root of all reason.”

“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can accept or reject as we wish, it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.”

“Whatever I find to be the truth, whatever it may be, shall be welcome to me. I want to know. With the same certainty with which I count on this ground to support me if I step on it, that this fire would burn me if I approached it, I want to be able to count on what I myself am and what I will be.

And if one cannot do this, I at least want to know that one cannot: and I will submit myself even to this outcome of the investigation if it reveals itself to me as the truth.”

“It is his incurable illness to regard the accidental as necessary.”

“The philosopher can only come together with John, because he alone has respect for reason and relies on the proof that the philosopher alone accepts: the internal one.”

“Act! act! It is to that end we are here.

Should we fret ourselves that others are not so perfect as we are, when we ourselves are only somewhat less imperfect than they? Is not this our greatest perfection – the vocation which has been given to us – that we must labour for the perfecting of others?

Let us rejoice in the prospect of that widely extended field which we are called to cultivate! Let us rejoice that power is given to us, and that our task is infinite!”

“As long as people do not become wiser and more just, all their efforts to become happy are in vain. Having escaped from the despot's prison, they will murder each other with the ruins of their broken chains. That would be too sad a fate if their own misery, or if they allow themselves to be warned in time, the misery of others, could not lead them to wisdom and justice at a later date.

So all events in the world seem to me to be instructive descriptions, which the great educator of humanity sets up, so that it can learn from them what it needs to know. Not that it learns it from them; we will never find anything in the whole of world history that we did not put into it ourselves; rather, through the assessment of real events, it develops from itself in an easier way what lies within itself: and so the French Revolution seems to me to be a rich picture of the great text: human rights and human worth.”

“As long as you speak about it in your schools with people of the trade according to the prescribed form, this prescribed form deceives both of you, and if you only agree on it, you spare each other many questions which you would find difficult to answer clearly.”

“Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, ‘Am I happy?’ and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, ‘No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.'

Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first…Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there.

In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.”