Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!
Beneficence is a duty; and he who frequently practices it, and sees his benevolent intentions realized comes, at length, really to love him to whom he has done good.
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.
Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.
Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt
At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world.
A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.
All appearances have a determinate magnitude (the relation of which to another assignable). The infinite does not appear as such, likewise not the simple. For the appearances are included between two boundaries (points) and are thus themselves determinate magnitudes.