Quote collection
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!"
"Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee."
"Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom."
"I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself."
"If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound."
"Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason."
"If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment."
"The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing which humanity ever experienced."
"Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."
"It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy"
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity."
"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."
"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 question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth"
"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."
"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."
"From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned."
"Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace."
"A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body."
"We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space."