Quotes from Ernst Junger

Die Menschen besitzen alle Anlagen zum glücklichen Leben; sie machen aber keinen Gebrauch davon." GESAMT WERKE. Band 2

Heutzutage trifft man gewöhnlich Leute, in denen der Typus vorwiegt, dem man anmerkt, dass er nur ein Buch gelesen hat.

At the bottom I was quite content, for though I have never had great cares I have never had so care-free a life as at the front. Everything is clear and simple. My rights and duties are prescribed. I need earn no money. My food is provided me, and if things go badly with me I have a thousend fellow-sufferers, and above all, the shadow of death reduces every problem to a pleasant insignificance.

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.

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

Hemos perdido mucho, tal vez todo, también el honor. Nos queda una cosa: el glorioso recuerdo del más maravilloso ejército que jamás haya existido y del más grandioso combate que jamás haya tenido lugar. Mantener su memoria en medio de esta época de renegados y de atrofia moral es el más altivo deber de todo aquel que luchó por la causa de Alemania no sólo con el fusil y la granada de mano sino también con el alma y el corazón.

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.

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.

Wars are bound to occur from time to time. In them is manifested that determination of nature to intervene directly in the evolution of the greatest organisms of the earth, though they strive to withdraw themselves from her influence, and to break it forcibly upon their one-sided and purely economic aims.

Governments change, files remain. The paradox remained: in the dossiers of the State the fact that I had risked my neck for it was simultaneously listed forever as treason. When my name was mentioned, the exalted file clerks in the government offices, who sat on their chairs only because I and people like me allowed them to, made a wry face.

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.

Economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake.

One should be guided less by catastrophes than by one's own internal weather conditions. Even when there was no wind, a hidden cliff could spell disaster; and one could quietly while away time in a cabin in the center of a typhoon.

In our present age, each day can bring shocking new manifestations of oppression, slavery, or extermination—whether aimed at specific social groupings or spread over entire regions. Exercising resistance to this is legal, as an assertion of basic human rights, which, in the best cases, are guaranteed in constitutions but which the individual has nevertheless to enforce.

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.

As Nietzsche said, "God is dead". The gods die but the Titans gain power. Technology is just the clothes, the armour, of the Titans.

Of course, no one is easier to terrorize than the person who believes that everything is over when his fleeting phenomenon is extinguished.

Irgendwie drängt sich auch dem ganz einfachen Gemüt die Ahnung auf, daß sein Leben in einen ewigen Kreislauf geschaltet, und daß der Tod des einzelnen gar kein so bedeutungsvolles Ereignis ist.

For dangers past—an old soldier's laugh. For those to come—a full glass, though death and the devil grin there, as long as the wine was good.

Human nature is indeed indestructible.

We may be certain that, by the logic of double-entry accounting, these two percent will reappear in other records than the election statistics, for instance in the registers of penitentiaries and penal labor camps, or in those places where God alone counts the victims.

Nothing is more repulsive to me than the literary man who must immediately display every emotion and every experience to its best advantage and stick it on paper.

Life is opinion," says Marcus Aurelius.

Der Bildhauer steht zunächst dem rohen Block, der puren Materie gegenüber, die jede Möglichkeit umschließt. Sie antworten dem Meißel; er kann zerstören oder Wasser des Lebens geistige Macht aus ihr befreien.