Immanuel Kant

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
 

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

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

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.

Jack Nicholson

A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear.

Acting is everybody's favorite second job.

Age is the first limitation on roles that I've ever had to encounter, and I hit that awhile ago.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

Beer, it's the best damn drink in the world.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Financially, I've lost money and made money, but I know my way around financially.

 

Frankly, I got into the movies because I like the movies a lot.

I don't have any fear of intimacy, but rather thrive on it, which is rare in a public person.

I don't have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.

I don't want people to know what I'm actually like. It's not good for an actor.

I know I can act. There aren't too many other jobs I know how to do.

I learned a long time ago in Hollywood that the only person I should vote for is myself.

I never had a policy about marriage. I got married very young in life and I always think in all relationships, I've always thought that it's counterproductive to have a theory on that.
 

I only take Viagra when I'm with more than one woman.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

I used to think that one of the great signs of security was the ability to just walk away.

I'll tell you one thing: Don't ever give anybody your best advice, because they're not going to follow it.

Anthony Trollope

A fellow oughtn't to let his family property go to pieces.

A husband is very much like a house or a horse.

A man's love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.

A man's mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

A woman's life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband. Nor is a man's life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

 

As to happiness in this life it is hardly compatible with that diminished respect which ever attends the relinquishing of labour.

As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes. 

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything. 

I think the greatest rogues are they who talk most of their honesty.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

James C. Maxwell

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers. 

Ampere was the Newton of Electricity. 

Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance. 

I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me. 

In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?

The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them! 

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend. 

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. 

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. 

A new untruth is better than an old truth. 

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time. 

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. 

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. 

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day. 

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant. 

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

Gustav Mahler

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything. 

Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos. 

Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking. 

Destiny smiles upon me but without making me the least bit happier. 

Discipline, work. Work, discipline.

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

Even if people censure me, they should do so hat in hand.

Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.

I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young . . . he killed himself in the prime of his life.

I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.

In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage. 

It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces. 

It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.

It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew. 

Alfred Lord Tennyson

A day may sink or save a realm. 

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies. 

A smile abroad is often a scowl at home. 

A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier times. 

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move. 

And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men. 

Authority forgets a dying king. 

Believe me, than in half the creeds. 

Better not be at all than not be noble. 

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Guard your roving thoughts with a jealous care, for speech is but the dialer of thoughts, and every fool can plainly read in your words what is the hour of your thoughts.

He makes no friends who never made a foe.

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.

In the long years liker they must grow; The man be more of woman, she of man.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power. 

Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.

Sin is too stupid to see beyond itself.

So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be.

Maurice Ravel

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy. 

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little. 

I begin by considering an effect. 

I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces. 

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second. 

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.
Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

William Golding

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of. 

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience. 

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket. 

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder. 

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

Jane Austen

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment. 

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. 

A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. 

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill. 

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. 

An artist cannot do anything slovenly. 

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.

Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety. 

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible. 

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.