Rousseau

1. Truth is no road to fortune.

2. Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man: labor sharpens his appetite and
temperance prevents his abusing it.
3. When woman complains...about unjust man-made inequality, she is wrong. This
inequality...is the work not of prejudice but of reason. It is up to the sex that nature has
charged with the bearing of children to be responsible for them to the other sex.
4. As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing
themselves from the poor.
5. Man's first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means
to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.
6. Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period, but wakes up in adversity.
7. Let us set down as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always
right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice in it of
which it cannot be said how and whence it entered.
8. Money is the seed of money, and the first franc is sometimes more difficult to acquire
than the second million.
9. There is only one law which by its nature requires unanimous assent. This is the social
pact: for the civil association is the most voluntary act in the world; every man having
been born free and master of himself, no one else may on any pretext whatsoever subject
him without his consent.
10. The general will is always straight, but the judgment that guides it is not always
enlightened.
11. Do not judge and you will never be mistaken.
12. At length I recalled the thoughtless words of a great princess, who, on being informed
that the country people had no bread, replied, 'Let them eat cake.'
13. The Catholic must adopt the decision handed down to him; the Protestant must learn to
decide for himself.
14. Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, a good digestion.
15. It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.
16. The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from the moment of its birth, and
bears in itself the causes of its destruction.
17. Everything is good when it leaves the Creator's hands; everything degenerates in the
hands of man.
18. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.
19. He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the
great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be
destroyed.
20. Everything is perfect coming from the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the
hands of man.
21. In the strict sense of the term, there has never been a true democracy, and there never will
be. It is contrary to the natural order that the greater number should govern and the
smaller number be governed.
 22. The passing from the state of nature to the civil society produces a remarkable change in
man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in place of instinct, and gives his actions the
moral quality they previously lacked.

Immanuel Kant
1. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind...The
understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union
can knowledge arise.
2. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility,
remains completely unknown to us.
3. We do not need science and philosophy to know what we should do to be honest and
good, yea, even wise and virtuous.
4. The sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense.
5. The beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept.
6. It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not errnot because they always judge
rightly, but because they do not judge at all.
7. It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.
8. Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law.
9. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often
and the more intensely reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me
and the moral law within me.
10. Finally, there is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately...This
imperative is Categorical...This imperative may be called that of Morality.
11. Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation
into nothing.
12. Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical
knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.
13. I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.
14. I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with
the mode of our knowledge of objects.
15. Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects...We must
therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics,
if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.
16. All our knowledge falls within the bounds of possible experience.
17. Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.
18. Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of
perception itself.
19. Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
20. There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which
can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will.
21. A good will is good not because of what it effects or accomplishes, nor because of its
fitness to attain some proposed end; it is good only through its willing, i.e. it is good in
itself.
22. The knowledge of the other world can be obtained here only by losing some of that
intelligence which is necessary for this present world.
23. Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
24. The Germans are praised in that, when constancy and sustained diligence are demanded,
they can go further than other peoples.
25. Now I say: the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.