“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.”
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785)
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Immanuel Kant 200
German philosopher 1724–1804Related quotes
“Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.”
“Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death”
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Prose Papers on Poetry Macmillan & Co 1910.
Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)
“Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility”
Master and God
Context: He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is. If it's only once, it must be good... He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody's dark world.
"The Keyboard: Guest Editorials", Videogaming Illustrated, (July 1983), p. 6
“For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be "happy"?”
Pt. I, Bk. II, ch. 1.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)
Context: For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be "happy"? By victorious Analysis, and Progress of the Species, happiness enough now awaits him. Kings can become philosophers; or else philosophers Kings. Let but Society be once rightly constituted,—by victorious Analysis. The stomach that is empty shall be filled; the throat that is dry shall be wetted with wine. Labour itself shall be all one as rest; not grievous, but joyous Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless indeed machinery will do it? Gratuitous Tailors and Restaurateurs may start up, at fit intervals, one as yet sees not how. But if each will, according to rule of Benevolence, have a care for all, then surely—no one will be uncared for. Nay, who knows but by sufficiently victorious Analysis, "human life may be indefinitely lengthened," and men get rid of Death, as they have already done of the Devil? We shall then be happy in spite of Death and the Devil.
“You need a reason to be angry. You don't need a reason to be happy.”
Sideways Stories From Wayside School
Source: Sideways Stories from Wayside School
“The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination.”
Quoted in Robert Perceval Graves, The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Vol. 3 (1889), p. 219.