Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.

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.