Top 100 Immanuel Kant Quotes
#1. It is an empirical judgement [to say] that I perceive and judge an object with pleasure. But it is an a priori judgement [to say] that I find it beautiful, i.e. I attribute this satisfaction necessarily to every one.
Immanuel Kant
#2. Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
Immanuel Kant
#3. A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
Immanuel Kant
#4. 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.
Immanuel Kant
#5. But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
Immanuel Kant
#6. Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#7. 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.
Immanuel Kant
#8. Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.
Immanuel Kant
#9. The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.
Immanuel Kant
#10. Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything
Immanuel Kant
#11. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
Immanuel Kant
#12. Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts; mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts.
Immanuel Kant
#13. If we knew that god exists, such knowledge would make morality impossible. For, if we acted morally from fear or fright, or confident of a reward, then this would not be moral. It would be enlightened selfishness.
Immanuel Kant
#14. If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all.
Immanuel Kant
#15. Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.
Immanuel Kant
#16. Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes
Immanuel Kant
#17. It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
Immanuel Kant
#18. The world will by no means perish by a diminution in the number of evil men.
Immanuel Kant
#19. Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
Immanuel Kant
#20. Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#21. Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.
Immanuel Kant
#22. ...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.
Immanuel Kant
#23. So act that anything you do may become universal law.
Immanuel Kant
#24. In what way will our remote posterity be able to cope with the enormous accumulation of historical records which a few centuries will bequeath to them?
Immanuel Kant
#25. 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.
Immanuel Kant
#26. ...[I]f I know that it is only by this process that the intended operation can be performed, then to say that if I fully will the operation, I also will the action required for it, is an analytical proposition...
Immanuel Kant
#27. Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
#28. If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
Immanuel Kant
#29. A person born blind cannot frame the smallest conception of darkness, because he has none of light. The savage knows nothing of poverty, because he does not know wealth and the ignorant has no conception of his ignorance, because he has none of knowledge.
Immanuel Kant
#30. It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
Immanuel Kant
#31. Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.
Immanuel Kant
#32. May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.
Immanuel Kant
#33. Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.
Immanuel Kant
#34. Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings
Immanuel Kant
#35. Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.
Immanuel Kant
#36. Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.
Immanuel Kant
#37. If, like Hume, I had all manner of adornment in my power, I would still have reservations about using them. It is true that some readers will be scared off by dryness. But isn't it necessary to scare off some if in their case the matter would end up in bad hands?
Immanuel Kant
#38. Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.
Immanuel Kant
#39. Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.
Immanuel Kant
#40. Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
Immanuel Kant
#41. Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason.
Immanuel Kant
#42. In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.
Immanuel Kant
#43. Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
#44. The essence of things is not altered by their external relations, and that which, abstracting from these, alone constitutes the absolute worth of man is also that by which he must be judged, whoever the judge may be, and even by the Supreme Being.
Immanuel Kant
#45. It is of great consequence to have previously determined the concept that one wants to elucidate through observation before questioning experience about it; for one finds in experience what one needs only if one knows in advance what to look for.
Immanuel Kant
#46. The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience
Immanuel Kant
#47. The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#48. By a lie a man throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity as a man
Immanuel Kant
#49. A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.
Immanuel Kant
#50. Have the courage to use your own understanding! - that is the motto of enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant
#51. Lithuanian nation must be saved, as it is the key to all the riddles - not only philology, but also in history - to solve the puzzle.
Immanuel Kant
#52. Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.
Immanuel Kant
#53. Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
Immanuel Kant
#54. Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.
Immanuel Kant
#55. Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.
Immanuel Kant
#56. Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.
Immanuel Kant
#57. Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.
Immanuel Kant
#59. I assert that, in any particular natural science, one encounters genuine scientific substance only to the extent that mathematics is present.
Immanuel Kant
#60. A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.
Immanuel Kant
#61. [Aristotle formal logic thus far (1787)] has not been able to advance a single step, and hence is to all appearances closed and completed.
Immanuel Kant
#62. By a lie, a man ... annihilates his dignity as a man.
Immanuel Kant
#63. Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.
Immanuel Kant
#64. ...[T]o be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer.
Immanuel Kant
#65. Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.
Immanuel Kant
#66. War seems to be ingrained in human nature, and even to be regarded as something noble to which man is inspired by his love of honor, without selfish motives.
Immanuel Kant
#67. The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.
Immanuel Kant
#68. The sum total of all possible knowledge of God is not possible for a human being, not even through a true revelation. But it is one of the worthiest inquiries to see how far our reason can go in the knowledge of God.
Immanuel Kant
#69. The sight of a being who is not graced by any touch of a pure and good will but who yet enjoys an uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator. Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of being even worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#70. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Immanuel Kant
#71. Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.
Immanuel Kant
#72. When the tremulous radiance of a summer night fills with twinkling stars and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn into a state of enhanced sensitivity made of friendship and disdain for the world and eternity
Immanuel Kant
#73. How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
Immanuel Kant
#75. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Immanuel Kant
#76. Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
Immanuel Kant
#77. I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her percepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life.
Immanuel Kant
#78. All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.
Immanuel Kant
#79. ...by saying that the former was only concerned with quality, the latter only with quantity, mistook cause for effect.
Immanuel Kant
#80. You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am
Immanuel Kant
#81. It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.
Immanuel Kant
#82. Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.
Immanuel Kant
#83. Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy)
Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism)
Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism)
Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)
Immanuel Kant
#84. Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.
Immanuel Kant
#85. Give me matter and i will build a world out of it.
Immanuel Kant
#86. There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
Immanuel Kant
#87. ...Act upon a maxim which, at the same time, involves its own universal validity for every rational being.
Immanuel Kant
#88. The main point of enlightenment is man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.
Immanuel Kant
#89. Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
Immanuel Kant
#90. That Logic has advanced in this sure course, even from the earliest times, is apparent from the fact that, since Aristotle, it has been unable to advance a step, and thus to all appearance has reached its completion.
Immanuel Kant
#91. Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.
Immanuel Kant
#92. One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
Immanuel Kant
#93. Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made.
Immanuel Kant
#94. The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.
Immanuel Kant
#95. ...[W]e must admit that... law must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity...
Immanuel Kant
#96. The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend - and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.
Immanuel Kant
#97. Do what is right, though the world may perish.
Immanuel Kant
#98. Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
#99. If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
Immanuel Kant
#100. Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.
Immanuel Kant
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
