Ernst Junger Quotes

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.

In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit.

Ernst Junger agreed that the defender had no moral right to surrender in these circumstances: “the defending force, after driving their bullets into the attacking one at five paces’ distance, must take the consequences. A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill.” During

Discipline had vanished from the world.It had been replaced by the catastrophe.We were living in permament unrest,and no one could trust anyone else.

The suspicion that there are invisible things, things that seldom appear or that are only shown to the chosen ones, had to be preceded by the knowledge of the visible things, that is, of experience. This provides the grip.

Despabílate amor Bonjour buon giorno guten morgen despabílate amor y toma nota sólo en el tercer mundo mueren cuarenta mil niños por día en el plácido cielo despejado flotan los bombarderos y los buitres cuatro millones tienen sida la codicia depila la amazonia buenos días good morning despabílate en los ordenadores de la abuela onu no caben más cadáveres de ruanda los fundamentalistas degüellan a extranjeros predica el papa contra los condones havelange estrangula a maradona bonjour monsieur le maire forza italia buon giorno guten morgen ernst junger opus dei buenos días good morning hiroshima despabílate amor que el horror amanece

From the Right, history appears as the history of Being, as the disclosure of an essential condition that carries its own immutable necessity. From the Left, history is the history of emancipation. It presents the capacity of humanity to choose and alter its condition. For the Right, the record of injustice yields an irreducible ground of suffering that must be affirmed as the essence of Being for humanity. For the Left, suffering is only that which waits to be turned aside when the advanced freedom brings humanity to the point where a choice can be upheld.

Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences. There was in these men a quality of both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevaleresque urge to prevail in battle.

Reading constantly brings new things; the maxims add up, they don’t need a particular arrangement, an organizing concept. In an era dominated by confusion, the maxim, like a small building block, remains something that continues to claim literary value.

The view that external things like rank, money, and honors bring happiness has frequently been criticized, but it is not necessarily incorrect. After all, these things belong, as Aquinas would have it, among the "accidents." Accidens is the unessential, which includes the body. If one manages to separate essence from flesh, if one manages, that is, to gain distance from oneself, then one climbs the first step toward spiritual power. Many exercises are geared to this--from the soldier's drill to the hermit's meditation. However, once the self has been successfully distanced, the essential can be brought back to the accidental. This process, resembling a vaccination with one's own blood, is initially manifested as a reanimation of the body. The physiognomy takes on the kind of features seen in paintings by old masters. They added something of their own. They blended it into the pigments. This also applies to objects; they were meaningful, now they gain a sense. A new light shines on things, they glow. Anyone can manage this; I heard the following from a disciple of Bruno's: "The world seemed hollow to me because my head was hollow." But the head, too, can be filled. First we must forget what we have learned.

When we stood thus on the crest of the Marble Cliffs, Brother Otho would often say that this was the meaning of life: reenacting creation in the ephemeral, the way a child at play imitates his father's work. What gives meaning to sowing and procreation, to building and establishing order, to images and poetry, is that the masterwork is reflected in them as in a mirror of multicolored glass that soon shatters.

His principle was that each theory was a contribution to genesis because in every era human intelligence conceives creation anew -- and that each interpretation contains no more truth than a leaf that unfolds and soon withers. That is the reason he called himself Phyllobius, "he who lives among leaves," in his unusual characteristic mixture of modesty and pride.