Immanuel Kant

“Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.”

“There is nothing higher than reason.”

“Manners or etiquette ('accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior') call for no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues. Even though manners are no virtues, they are a means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crude elements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and the more capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles.”

“Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.”

“The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.”

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

“It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.”

“Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue”

“No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law ? i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.”

“Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.”

“THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.”

“Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings”

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

“Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.”

“You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am”

“Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.”

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.”

“I am myself by inclination an investigator.”

“Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.”

“Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.”

“Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.”

“Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”

“Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”

“If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.”

“Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.”

“Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.”

“Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.”

“A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.”

“Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.”

“Beneficence is a duty.”

“Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”

“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.”

“It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.”

“Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.”

“If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.”

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

“The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.”

“The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.”

“Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.”

“In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.”

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

“Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes”

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

“The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.”

“I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

“A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.”

“The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.”

“Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.”

“Maximum individuality within maximum community”