Julius Evola > Quotes

“America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate”
― Julius Evola

“Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call ‘the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of ‘life', never abandon the principle of struggle.”
― Julius Evola

“My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.”
― Julius Evola

“The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are.”
― Julius Evola

“Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the centre of which is constituted of technology, science, production, "productivity," and "consumption." And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence—then we are not even close to what is essential...”
― Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

“Worldview" is not based on books; it is an internal form, which at times in a person with little education is expressed much more brightly, than in some other "intellectual" or scientist.”
― Julius Evola

“The legionary spirit is that fire of one who will choose the hardest road, who will fight to the death even when all is already lost.”
― Julius Evola

“For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.”
― Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

“Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean “to think”, but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one’s consciousness into it.”
― Julius Evola, Pagan Imperialism

“Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“It is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“What is really required to defend ‘the West’ against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus, the world of the ‘Westerners’ has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance – and the cult of the skin, the myth of ‘safety’ and of ‘war on war’, and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, ‘democratic’ existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.”
― Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War

“There is a superior unity of all those who despite all, fight in different parts of the world the same battle, lead the same revolt, and are the bearers of the same intangible Tradition. These forces appear to be scattered and isolated in the world, and yet are inexorably connected by a common essence that is meant to preserve the absolute ideal of the Imperium and to work for its return.”
― Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

“In the Islamic tradition a distinction is made between two holy wars, the "greater holy war" (el-jihadul-akbar) and the "lesser holy war" (el-jihadul-ashgar). This distinction originated from a saying (hadith) of the Prophet, who on the way back from a military expedition said: "You have returned from a lesser holy war to a great holy war." The greater holy war is of an inner and spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing "infidel" populations under the rule of "God's Law" (al-Islam). The relationship between the "greater" and "lesser holy war", however, mirrors the relationship between the soul and the body; in order to understand the heroic asceticism or "path of action", it is necessary to understand the situation in which the two paths merge, the "lesser holy war" becoming the means through which a "greater holy war" is carried out, and vice versa: the "little holy war", or the external one, becomes almost a ritual action that expresses and gives witness to the reality of the first. Originally, orthodox Islam conceived of a unitary form of asceticism: that which is connected to the jihad or "holy war".”
― Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War

“This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.”
― Julius Evola

“Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is ‘open-minded’ and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“The best and most authentic reaction against feminism and against every other female aberration should not be aimed at women as such, but at men instead. It should not be expected of women that they return to what they really are and thus reestablish the necessary inner and outer conditions for a reintegration of a superior race, when men themselves retain only the semblance of true virility.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today's world, even at its problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

The natural place for such a man, the land in which he would not be a stranger, is the world of Tradition.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“When a cycle of civilisation is reaching its end, it is difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposing the forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed. The essential thing is to not let oneself be impressed by the omnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. These forces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact, on a short chain. One should not become fixated on the present, and on things at hand, but keep in view the conditions that may come about in the future. Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting the forces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keeping oneself firm and ready to intervene when "the tiger, which cannot leap of the person riding it, is tired of running".”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Modern man has not only to fight against materialism, but must also defend himself from the snares and allures of false supernaturalism. His defense will be firm and effective only if he is capable of returning to the origins, of assimilating the ancient traditions, and then of relying upon the ascesis to carry out the task of reestablishing his inner condition. For it is through this that these traditions will reveal to him their deepest and perennially real content and show him, step by step, the path.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.”
― Julius Evola

“The substance of every true and stable political organism is something resembling an Order, a Männerbünd in charge of the principle of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of their honor.”
― Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

“The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is ‘heroism’. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities. From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism. War makes one realize the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a ‘more-than-life’, and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.”
― Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War

“American women are characteristically frigid and materialistic. The man who 'has his way' with an American girl is under a material obligation to her. The woman has granted a material favour. In cases of divorce American law overwhelmingly favours the woman. American women will divorce readily enough when they see a better bargain. It is frequently the case in America that a woman will be married to one man but already 'engaged' to a future husband, the man she plans to marry after a profitable divorce.”
― Julius Evola

“One thing becomes very clear; if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World