It is not reasoning or even emotion that drives most of people’s actions, but unconscious imitation and suggestion.
Actions performed under suggestion can be either good or bad. Only actions that are performed consciously and in accord with the demands of your conscience cannot be bad. And meanwhile, for every thousand deeds that we do under suggestion, there is hardly one that we do consciously.
Enlightenment is a person’s emergence from his own self-supported immaturity. This immaturity consists in his inability to use his reason without being guided by someone else. And this immaturity is supported by the person himself when the cause of it lies not in a lack of reason, but in a lack of resolution and courage to use it without another’s guidance.
— Kant
Have the courage to use your own reason. This is the guiding rule for enlightenment.
— Kant
If, out of all the voices speaking within his soul, a human being could unmistakably recognize the voice of his true, eternal self, then he would never err, would never commit evil. This is why you must know yourself.
Examine carefully the causes of the ignorance of the masses and you will see that the main cause does not at all consist in a lack of schools or libraries, as we tend to think, but in the superstitions that are suggested to them and ceaselessly supported in them by every means of influence by the people who profit from these superstitions.
True enlightenment is propagated only by examples of moral life. All the supposedly enlightening activities of schools, books, newspapers, theaters, etc., not only have nothing in common with enlightenment, but are for the most part directly contrary to it.
Whenever you feel that you are about to act not according to reasoning or an inner motive, but according to someone else’s external influence, stop and think whether the influence you are following is good or bad.
