TuesdayFeb 24, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason.
The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.
The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.
The death of dogma is the birth of reality.
The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.
Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; ere long she shall appear to vindicate thee.
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.
I had to set limits to knowledge in order to make place for faith.
Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, also presaged the feasibility of an evolutionary theory: The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common structure, which seems to be fundamental not only in their sk
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.
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.
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.
The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.
Morality is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we are to be worthy of happiness.
... as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe that feeling will help them out, even in what concerns general laws: and besides, feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil, nor has any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings....
The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.
All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
In law, a man is guilty when he violates the rights of another. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
If [man] is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals, for 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.
The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
Human reason is by nature architectonic.
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.
Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end.
God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.
But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is to be avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.
I ought, therefore I can.
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.
Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.
Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.
The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations.... For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
There is ... but one categorical imperative: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law.
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
I am never to act without willing that the maxim by which I act should become a universal law.
Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
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