All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.
Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
Great minds think for themselves.
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.
Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.
Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
Do what is right, though the world may perish.
By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.
Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman ; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires.
The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
Always regard every man as an end in himself, and never use him merely as a means to your ends [i.e., respect that each person has a life and purpose that is their own; do not treat people as objects to be exploited].
Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings
The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.
The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.
I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her percepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life.
The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Marriage...is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.
But a lie is a lie, and in itself intrinsically evil, whether it be told with good or bad intents.
The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am
When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any
Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.
Laziness and cowardice explain why so many men. . . remain under a life-long tutelage and why it is so easy for some men to set themselves up as the guardians of all the rest. . . If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides my diet, I need not trouble myself. If I am willing to pay, I need not think. Others will do it for me.
If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.
Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.
If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise.
Do the right thing because it is right.
If we could see ourselves... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.
The only thing permanent is change.
All perception is colored by emotion.
Honesty is better than any policy.
The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth
Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.
It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.
If we knew that god exists, such knowledge would make morality impossible. For, if we acted morally from fear or fright, or confident of a reward, then this would not be moral. It would be enlightened selfishness.
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.
Act in such a way that you will be worthy of being happy.
Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.
Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.
Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.
Reason can never prove the existence of God.
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.
Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Maximum individuality within maximum community
Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.
Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Beneficence is a duty.
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.
No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law ? i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.
Perpetual Peace is only found in the graveyard.
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.
Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.
God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.
Maturity is having the courage to use one's own intelligence!
Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.
A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
The hand is the visible part of the brain.
Art is purposiveness without purpose.
Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.
Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.
Freedom can never be comprehended, nor even can insight into it be gained.
I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
The human heart refuses To believe in a universe Without a purpose.
It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.
If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.
THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.
Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes
If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
***Three Conditions of Happiness*** If you have work to do If you have someone you love If You have hope Then You are Happy now!
If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.
A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.
There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.
Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything
