- Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
- Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
- Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
- For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
- Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt
- 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.
- Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
- Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
- Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
- The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
- Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
- Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
- We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.
- Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
- All human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.
- Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another.
- Dignity is a value that creates irreplaceability.
- Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.
- From the crooked timber of humanity, a straight board cannot be hewn.
- A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
- Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.
- If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on... then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.
- If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
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