Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
The main point of enlightenment is man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.
Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself: and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
Dignity is a value that creates irreplaceability.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations.
But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
The death of dogma is the birth of reality.
The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgement of reason, and perverts its liberty.
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.
The true religion is to be posited not in the knowledge or confession of what God allegedly does or has done for our salvation, but in what we must do to become worthy of this.