Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Reason as you will.”37
“So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never only as a means,”
The first Critique belonged to the Aufklärung; the second belonged to the Romantic movement; the attempt to combine both was one of the subtlest performances in the history of philosophy.
Nothing is beautiful or sublime but feeling makes it so.
If we wish to know the real nature of man we need only observe the behavior of states.
A religion of reason bases itself not upon a divine revelation, but upon a sense of duty interpreted as the divinest element in man.
When a church becomes an institution for compelling belief or worship; when it assumes to itself the sole right to interpret Scripture and define morality; when it forms a priesthood claiming exclusive approaches to God and divine grace; when it makes its worship a magic ritual possessing miraculous powers; when it becomes an arm of the government and an agent of intellectual tyranny; when it seeks to dominate the state and to use secular rulers as tools of ecclesiastical ambition—then the free mind will rise against such a church, and will seek outside of it that “pure religion of reason”
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only “morals can cut the knot which politics cannot unloose.”
he put more faith in education than in revolution.
Work is the best discipline, and should be required at all stages of education.
every advance is canceled by retrogression.
“On the Power of the Mind to Master the Feeling of Illness by Force of Resolution.”
“The starry heavens above me; the moral law within me.”
Gedankending,
for the philosophy of one age is likely to be the literature of the next.
“this small capital, which, as people jokingly say, has ten thousand poets and a few inhabitants.”
He had learned that the most perfect plan is often the worst [and] that in the moral world, as in the material, nothing moves in a straight line; in short, that life is like a voyage,
He felt that u nur die Lumpe sind bescheiden”— only rascals are modest.13
“The first propensities to love in an un-corrupted youth,” he wrote at sixty, “take altogether a spiritual direction. Nature seems to desire that one sex may by the senses perceive goodness and beauty in the other. And so, by the sight of this girl, and by my strong inclination for her, a new world of the beautiful and the excellent was revealed to me.”
that he had in him a daimon—the urge and drive of an omnivorous genius that demanded freedom for its full development to its own imperative destiny.
Now I had believed, from my youth upward, that I stood on very good terms with my God—nay, I even fancied … that he might be in arrears to me, as I was daring enough to think that I had something to forgive him. This presumption was grounded on my infinite good will, to which, it seemed to me, he should have given better assistance. It may be imagined how often I got into disputes on this subject with my friends, which, however, always terminated in the friendliest way.
casual combination of pantheistic faith and rationalistic doubt.
It was the well-nigh universal opinion that he had a slate loose in the upper story.”
Soon he was confessing to a friend that “one is not happier by a hair’s breadth by attaining the object of his wishes.”
It is a very pleasant sensation when a new passion begins to stir in us before the old one is quite extinct. Thus, when the sun is setting, one likes to see the moon rise on the opposite side.”
I lacked an event, a fable, in which they could be seen as a whole.
“That was a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart.”
Goethe was especially averse to the Christian emphasis on sin and contrition;54 he preferred to sin without remorse.
Shakespeare, Spinoza, and Linnaeus.
“Spinoza,” he wrote, “does not demonstrate the existence of God; he demonstrates that existence [the matter-mind reality] is God.
torn as always between Eros and Destiny, longing for woman, but resolved to be great.
Each civilization was a biological entity, a plant with its own birth, youth, maturity, decline, and death; it should be studied from the standpoint of its own time, without moral prepossessions based on another environment and age.
He tried hard to be a man in the soldier’s sense of battle, beer, and bordellos; he visited the prostitutes who attended the camp;
bind or mulct
He could no longer pray, but he envied those who could, and he described with a sense of great loss the comfort that religion was bringing to thousands of souls in suffering, grief, and the nearness of death.
“When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. To pardon is to receive a property that has been lost. Misanthropy is a protracted suicide.”
Noble souls are held together by a delicate thread which often proves lasting.
who as yet can only surmise from his follies that Nature has destined him for something; who demands unbounded love and yet knows not what he can offer in return;
In any case, it is not natural for authors to like one another; they are reaching for the same prize.
they would send these “gifts” into the camp of the Philistines “like foxes with burning tails.”
Goethe, annoyed by these constant interruptions, said, ‘What a nuisance! I can never avoid this sort of thing!’ With a smile, Beethoven answered, ‘Don’t let it bother your Excellency; the homage is probably meant for me.’
There are happy moments in history behind the drama of tragedy, and beneath the notice of Historians.
Perhaps the Mosaic Code owed its survival not so much to its inherent wisdom as to its service in maintaining order and stability in communities living dangerously amid hostile creeds and alien laws.
Anti-Semitism lost some of its religious bases as orthodoxy declined.
THE Industrial Revolution was the most basic process, the political struggle was the most exciting drama, of the second half of the eighteenth century in England.
Law is injustice codified; it protects the idle rich against the exploited poor,26 and adds a new evil—lawyers.
Every alert youngster passes through this stage on his way to position, possessions, and such frightened conservatism as we shall find in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Which of us would have a future if his past were known?
Only in reading him did men perceive that he was creating literature as he spoke—by his command of the English language, his luminous descriptions, his range of knowledge and illustrations, his ability to bring philosophic perspective to the issues of the day.
So, when Boswell said that Burke was like a hawk, Johnson countered, “Yes, sir, but he catches nothing.”
