“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.”

From such crooked timber as humanity is made of, no straight thing was ever constructed.

We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.

You must, therefore you can. A free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same thing.

All human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.

All so-called moral interest consists simply in respect for the law.

War seems to be ingrained in human nature, and even to be regarded as something noble to which man is inspired by his love of honor, without selfish motives.

Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.

It is certainly a bad sign of common sense to appeal to it as a witness.

To be is to do.

But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.

Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

Things which as effects presuppose others as causes cannot be reciprocally at the same time causes of these.

Freedom, is a property of all rational beings.

Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgement of reason, and perverts its liberty.

A man is only as old as the woman he feels.

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.