Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.
Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
Since in early youth it cannot be known what ends are likely to occur to us in the course of life, parents seek to have their children taught a great many things, and provide for their skill in the use of means for all sorts of arbitrary ends, of none of which can they determine whether it may not perhaps hereafter be an object to determine their pupil, but which it is at all events possible that he might aim at; and this anxiety is so great that they commonly neglect to form and correct their judgement on the value of the things which may be chosen as ends.
If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on... then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.
Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
