Date: 1785

"Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose--if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left (not, of course, as a mere wish but as...

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1785

"One cannot give too many or too frequent warnings against this laxity, or even mean cast of mind, which seeks its principle among empirical motives and laws; for,human reason in its weariness gladly rests on this pillow and in a dream of sweet illusions (which allow it to embrace a cloud instead...

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1797-8, 1799

"Conscience is practical reason holding the human being's duty before him for his acquittal or condemnation in every case that comes under a law."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1797-8, 1799

"Consciousness of an inner court in the human being ('before which his thoughts accuse or excuse one another') is conscience."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1800

"Know, that the human being's thoughts and deeds / Are not like ocean billows, blindly moved."

— Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805)

Date: 1800

"The inner world, his microcosmus, is / The deep shaft, out of which they spring eternally."

— Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805)

Date: 1800

"They grow by certain laws, like the tree's fruit-- / No juggling chance can metamorphose them. / Have I the human kernel first examined? / Then I know, too, the future will and action."

— Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805)

Date: 1807

"The formalism of such a 'Philosophy of Nature' teaches, say, that the Understanding is Electricity, or the Animal is Nitrogen, or that they are the equivalent of the South or North Pole, etc., or represent it."

— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)

Date: 1807

"The individual whose substance is the more advanced Spirit runs through this past just as one who takes up a higher science goes through the preparatory studies he has long since absorbed, in order to bring their content to mind: he recalls them to the inward eye, but has no lasting interest in ...

— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)

Date: 1818, 1859

"Now this is by no means possible, for as soon as we turn into ourselves to make the attempt, and seek for once to know ourselves fully by means of introspective reflection, we are lost in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like the hollow glass globe, from out of which a voice speaks whose cau...

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)