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

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

By a lie a man throws away, and as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.

The hand is the visible part of the brain.

Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Dignity is a value that creates irreplaceability.

Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.

The history of nature, begins with good, for it is God’s work; the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

Experience may teach us what is, but never that it cannot be otherwise.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

And painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

I belong to the givers. I want to give a little happiness even if I haven’t had much for myself. Music has enriched my life and, hopefully – through me, a little – the public’s. If anyone left an opera house feeling more happy and at peace, I achieved my purpose.

Every moment of happiness was just a distraction from myself.

To those who have as yet not learned the secret of true happiness, which is the joy of coming into the closest relationship with the Maker and Preserver of all things: begin now to study the little things in your own door yard.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, it’s bloom is shed; Or, like the snow-fall in the river, A moment white, then melts forever.

Business first; pleasure afterwards.