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Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

— Immanuel Kant What is Enlightenment? (1784)

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More quotes by Immanuel Kant

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

Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.

There must be a seed of every good thing in the character of men, otherwise no one can bring it out.

The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.

Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.

Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Immanuel Kant (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.