One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.

The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.

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.

Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.