Johann Gottlieb Fichte Quotes
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Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.
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The correct relationship between the higher and lower classes, the appropriate mutual interaction between the two is, as such, the true underlying support on which the improvement of the human species rests. The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs; the former are the thinking and designing [ Entwerfende ] part, the latter the executive part.
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If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him ; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.
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All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.
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Science raises itself above all Ages and all Times, embracing and apprehending the ONE UNCHANGING TIME as the higher source of all Ages and Epochs, and grasping that vast idea in its free, unbounded comprehension.
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The person who doubts there is an external world does not need proof: he needs a cure.
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Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.
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I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.
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I am satisfied with, and stand firm as a rock on the belief that all that happens in God's world is for the best, but what is merely germ, what blossom and what fruit I do not know.
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There are two great classes of men: the people and the scholars, the men of science. For the former, nothing exists but that which directly leads to action. It is for the latter to see beyond. They are the free artists who create the future and its history, the conscious architects of the world.
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To be happy is not the purpose of our being rather it is to deserve happiness.
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The infinitely smallest part of space is always a space, something endowed with continuity, not at all a mere point or the boundary between specified places in space.
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Only through blind Instinct, in which the only possible guidance of the Imperative is awanting, does the Power in Intuition remain undetermined; where it is schematised as absolute it becomes infinite; and where it is presented in a determinate form, as a principle, it becomes at least manifold. By the above-mentioned act of Intelligising, the Power liberates itself from Instinct, to direct itself towards Unity.
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This Being out of God cannot, by any means, be a limited, completed, and inert Being, since God himself is not such a dead Being, but, on the contrary, is Life; - but it can only be a Power, since only a Power is the true formal picture or Schema of Life. And indeed it can only be the Power of realising that which is contained in itself - a Schema.
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Pure thought is itself the divine existence; and conversely, the divine existence, in its immediate essence, is nothing else than pure thought.
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A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.
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By philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands.
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My mind can take no hold on the present world, nor rest in it a moment, but my whole nature rushes onward with irresistible force towards a future and better state of being.
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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 reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.
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As to those in whom the will of God is not inwardly accomplished,-because there is no inward life in them, for they are altogether outward,-upon them the will of God is wrought as alone it can be; appearing at first sight bitter and ungracious, though in reality merciful and loving in the highest degree. To those who do not love God, all things must work together immediately for pain and torment, until, by means of the tribulation, they are led to salvation at last.
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The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.
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The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.
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Instinct is blind;-a consciousness without insight. Freedom, as the opposite of Instinct, is thus seeing, and clearly conscious of the grounds of its activity.
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An infirmity which affects the whole race, is no proper object for the scorn of an individual who belongs to that race, and who, before he could expose it, must himself have been its slave.