A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.
Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.
An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.
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.
Even a man’s exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.
Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.
The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.
Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
Art is purposiveness without purpose.