“Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.”

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.

What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown.

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

For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

Freedom is the opposite of necessity.

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.

Give me matter and I will build a world out of it.

The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.

A woman finds it much easier to do ill than well.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.

You were the easiest to love. Hardest to leave. And impossible to forget.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

It is easy to rule over the good.

It’s easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net whose cords and knots are strong; but even so, enmeshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.