Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a German philosopher, became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant before him,...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth19 May 1762
CountryGermany
Pure thought is itself the divine existence; and conversely, the divine existence, in its immediate essence, is nothing else than pure thought.
I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.
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
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.
God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life.
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.
He who is firm in will molds the world to himself
We do not act because we know, but we know because we are called upon to act; the practical reason is the root of all reason.