Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’- that is the motto of enlightenment.
reasonquotes
It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen’s point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?
A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.
The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.
It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.
The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?
It is not my design to teach the method that everyone must follow in order to use his reason properly, but only to show the way in which I have tried to use my own.
Although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.