I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.

The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

What are the aims which are at the same time duties? They are perfecting of ourselves, the happiness of others.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.