German Quotes

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

Organized religion: the world's largest pyramid scheme.

For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.

The only people who attain power are those who crave it.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.

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.'

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

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?

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

To be is to do.

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

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

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

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

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

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

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

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.