“Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.”

The great mass of people are worthy of our respect.

Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!

Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Since the human race’s natural end is to make steady cultural progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progressing toward the better. And this progress may well be occasionally interrupted, but it will never be broken off.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

The outcome of an act commonly influences our judgment about its rightness, even though the former was uncertain, while the latter is certain.

Art is purposiveness without purpose.

He who would know the world must first manufacture it.

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.

I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

I think happiness is love.

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.

Happiness exists when you don’t know a thing.

There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans.

Self-loathing doesn’t keep me from being happy. But that doesn’t mean I don’t struggle.

I think a lot of people are afraid of being happy because of what others might think.

You deserve to be a happy person you were born to be.