Emmanuel Kant lived a regimented life in his later yers. For over 40 years, he woke up every morning at 5:00 AM and wrote for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours. He followed that up with lunch at the same restaurant each day. Then, in the afternoon, he would go on an extended walk through the same park, on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. Every day.
Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg, Prussia. He never left the city. Despite the sea being an hour away, he never saw it.
Kant was efficiency personified. He was so mechanical in his habits that his neighbors joked they could tune their clocks based on when he left his apartment each day. He would leave for his daily walk at 3:30 PM, have dinner with the same friend every evening, and return home to finish work and go to bed at exactly 10:00 PM.
What a contrast with his great writings. Here are some quotes - more are HERE.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
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.
