Julius Evola Quotes

“America has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest.

It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has built a society where man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate.”

“American women are characteristically frigid and materialistic. The man who 'has his way' with an American girl is under a material obligation to her.

The woman has granted a material favour. In cases of divorce American law overwhelmingly favours the woman. American women will divorce readily enough when they see a better bargain.

It is frequently the case in America that a woman will be married to one man but already 'engaged' to a future husband, the man she plans to marry after a profitable divorce.”

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call ‘the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of ‘life', never abandon the principle of struggle.”

“Be what progressives call an extremist.”

“But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.”

“Even without being killed a man can experience death, he can conquer, he can realize the culmination characteristic of a 'super-life'.

From a higher point of view, Paradise, the Kingdom of Heaven, Valhalla, the Island of the Heroes, etc., are only symbolic figurations forged for the masses, figurations that in reality designate transcendent states of consciousness, beyond life and death.

The ancient Aryan tradition used the term jivan-mukti to indicate such a realization while still in the mortal body.”

“If a 'superman' undoubtedly constitutes a central idea of the whole of Nietzschean thought, it is in terms of a 'positive superman', it is not that grotesqueness in the style of d’Annunzio, nor the 'blond beast of prey' (this is one of Nietzsche’s poorest expressions) and not even the exceptional individual who incarnates a maximum of the 'will to power', 'beyond good and evil', however without any light and without a higher sanction.

The positive superman, which suits the 'better Nietzsche', is instead to be identified with the human type who even in a nihilistic, devastated, absurd, godless world knows how to stand on his feet, because he is capable of giving himself a law from himself, in accordance with a new higher freedom.”

“It will no longer be the idea that gives value and power to an individual, but the individual that gives value, power and justification to an idea.”

“My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.”

“The 'human' sense of life, so typical of the modern West, confirms its plebeian and lower aspect. That which some were ashamed of – 'man' – others took pride in.

The ancient world elevated the individual to God, made every effort to unbind him from passion, to adapt him to transcendence, with free air of heights in contemplation as well as in action; it knew traditions of non-human heroes and of men of divine blood.

The Semiticised world not only deprived the 'creature' of the divine, but finally reduced God to a human figure. Bringing back to life the demonism of a Pelasgian substratum, it substituted the pure Olympian regions, vertiginous in their radiant perfection, with the terrorist viewpoints of its apocalypses, of hells, of predestination, of perdition.

God was no longer the aristocratic god of the Romans, the god pf patricians, to whom one prays standing, in the light of the fire, head up high and which is carried at the head of the victorious legions.”

“The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, 'I think, therefore I am': Americans do not think, yet they are.”

“The emancipation of women was destined to follow that of the slaves and the glorification of people without a caste and without traditions, namely, the pariah.

In a society that no longer understands the figure of the ascetic and of the warrior; in which the hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepters; in which the archetype of the virile man is represented by a boxer or by a movie star if not by the dull wimp represented by the intellectual, the college professor, the narcissistic puppet of the artist, or the busy and dirty money-making banker and the politician – in such a society it was only a matter of time before women rose up and claimed for themselves a 'personality' and a 'freedom' according to the anarchist and individualist meaning usually associated with these words.”

“The legionary spirit is that fire of one who will choose the hardest road, who will fight to the death even when all is already lost.”

“The true state will be oriented against both capitalism and communism. At its center will stand a principle of authority and a transcendent symbol of sovereignty. The state is the primary element that precedes nation, people, and society.

The state – and with the state everything that is properly constituted as political order and political reality – is defined essentially on the basis of an idea, not by naturalistic and contractual factors.”

“This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.”

“Wisdom is an absolute positivism which regards only what can be grasped by direct experience as real, and everything else as unreal, abstract, and illusory.”

“Worldview is not based on books; it is an internal form, which at times in a person with little education is expressed much more brightly, than in some other 'intellectual' or scientist.”