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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“Humanity may endure the loss of everything; all its possessions may be turned away without infringing its true dignity - all but the possibility of improvement.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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.

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“Full surely there is a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered on it here, and in no other form than that wherein they know it here, at any moment.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life.

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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.

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“Here below is not the land of happiness: I know it now; it is only the land of toil, and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Nothing is more destructive of individual character than for a man to lose all faith in his own abilities for the prosecution of his work.

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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.

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“Not alone to know, but to act according to thy knowledge, is thy destination,
proclaims the voice of my inmost soul. Not for indolent contemplation and study of thyself, nor for brooding over emotions of piety,
no, for action was existence given thee; thy actions, and thy actions alone, determine thy worth.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“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.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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.

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte