Quote collection
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done"
"I learned to honor human beings, and I would find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart to all others a value establishing the rights of humanity."
"Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law."
"Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent."
"Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale."
"Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order."
"The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason."
"The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."
"Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose."
"The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing."
"Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors."
". . . 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. . . ."
"Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification."
"Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos."
"Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man."
"What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?"
"Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles. ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions."
"Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses."
"Act in such a way that you will be worthy of being happy."