A human being’s awareness of his law is a manifestation of the God that dwells within him.
The notion of duty in all its purity is not only incomparably simpler, clearer and more understandable for everyone in practice than this same notion derived from the pursuit of happiness or linked to it (which always requires a fair amount of artificiality and subtle interpretation), but is also more powerful, more persistent and carries a greater promise of success before the court of common sense than every self-interested motive—as long as the notion of duty has been assimilated by common sense and is completely independent of self-interested motives.
The realization that I can because I must reveals in a human being a depth of divine gifts, letting him feel the greatness and sublimity of his true purpose. And if a person were to pay more attention to this and get used to fully separating virtue from the whole mass of benefits that serve as the reward for doing one’s duty and seeing it in its complete purity; if the constant exercise of virtue was made the basis of private and public education (namely, the method of insisting that duties be performed, which has almost always been neglected), then people’s moral condition would rapidly improve. The fact that up to this point the teaching of virtue did not yield good results is due to the false assumption that the motivation derived from the idea of duty is either too weak or too abstract, and that the calculation of reward for following the law, which we can expect both in this world and the next, acts as a stronger impetus for the soul. And yet, it is a person’s awareness of the divine source within him that motivates him more than any external reward to fulfill the law of goodness.
— After Kant
Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends. He is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral—we say it with Marcus Aurelius and with Kant—whose aim or motive may become a universal rule. We affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the Eternal in each perishing man.
— Emerson
Every person, from the emperor to the beggar, must first take care of self-perfection, because it is only self-perfection that gives everyone the good.
— Confucius
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
— Thoreau
The fulfillment of the law of goodness has nothing in common with material, worldly goods. Material goods that coincide with the fulfillment of the law harm the human soul. The greatest elevation of the soul happens under the conditions in which the opposition of the moral good to the material good causes suffering.
