So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
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Quotes by Immanuel Kant
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
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It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.
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As everybody likes to be honoured, so people imagine that God also wants to be honoured. They forget that the fulfilment of duty towards men is the only honour adequate to him. Thus is formed the conception of a religion of worship, instead of a merely moral religion. Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly. If once a man has come to the idea of a service which is not purely moral, but is supposed to be agreeable to God himself, or capable of propitiating him, there is little difference between the several ways of serving him. For all these ways are of equal value. Whether the devotee accomplishes his statutory walk to the church, or whether he undertakes a pilgrimage to the sanctuaries of Loretto and Palestine, whether he repeats his prayer-formulas with his lips, or like the Tibetan, uses a prayer-wheel is quite indifferent. As the illusion of thinking that a man can justify himself before God in any way by acts of worship is religious superstition, so the illusion that he can obtain this justification by the so-called intercourse with God is religious mysticism (Schwärmerei). Such superstition leads inevitably to sacerdotalism (Pfaffenthum) which will always be found where the essence is sought not in principles of morality, but in statutory commandments, rules of faith and observances.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Life)
Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.
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A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature, probably also the disposition of the whole universe, give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind, just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea.
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Human freedom is realized 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.
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