18 quotes
Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
The master is himself an animal, and needs a master.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
This problem is the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event are determined by universal laws.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
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.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
One cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men’s actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice and destructiveness.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)