[To think for oneself] is the maxim of a reason never passive. The tendency to such passivity, and therefore to heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest prejudice of all is to represent nature as not subject to the rules that the understanding places at its basis by means of its own essential law, i.e. is superstition. Deliverance from superstition is called enlightenment; because although this name belongs to deliverance from prejudices in general, yet superstition especially (in sensu eminenti) deserves to be called a prejudice. For the blindness in which superstition places us, which it even imposes on us as an obligation, makes the need of being guided by others, and the consequent passive state of our reason, peculiarly noticeable. Immanuel Kant
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
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Plato
The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
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John Berry
The Encyclopedia--the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment...
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Peter Prange
Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try ... The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must forever try to reach enlightenment.
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Iain Pears
Enlightenment is not a goal to be attained, it is a state-of-being to be regained.
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Kim Chestney
More Quotes By Immanuel Kant
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it...
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the...
