Top 100 Quotes About Immanuel Kant
#1. In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry Kissinger
#2. When Friedrich Nietzsche mocked Immanuel Kant for having "discovered a moral faculty in man", he inadvertently resolved Kant's dilemma of being unable to identify what exactly constituted his "moral law" for fear of offending against a charge of empiricism from the likes of David Hume.
Joseph B.H. McMillan
#3. I'm no syllogism incarnate, but my wife makes me look like Immanuel Kant.
Claudia Cardinale
#4. Immanuel Kant would've made a lousy lawyer, but a great judge!
Stephen Gillers
#5. Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
#6. Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds becomes mature enough for sex.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#7. I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.
Bernard Beckett
#8. Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.
Tom Butler-Bowdon
#9. Immanuel Kant famously claimed that 'he who wills the ends wills the means,' but he never spent much time in Washington.
Elliott Abrams
#10. There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don't have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
John Cage
#11. Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#12. Immanuel Kant is credited with saying, "If the stars came out only once in a lifetime, we'd stay up all that night." Now we stay up late in Plato's cave just to watch the enervated stars on The Tonight Show.
William J. O'Malley
#13. Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. ... 1 Nothing is required for this enlightenment ... except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. - IMMANUEL KANT, What Is Enlightenment?
Jon Meacham
#14. Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.
Stefan Zweig
#15. Seek not the favor of the mulititude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them. Immanuel Kant
Bohdi Sanders
#16. If we could see ourselves ... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.
Immanuel Kant
#17. 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
#18. There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.
Immanuel Kant
#19. It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.
Immanuel Kant
#20. The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.
Immanuel Kant
#21. Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
Immanuel Kant
#22. Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.
Immanuel Kant
#24. Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
Immanuel Kant
#25. If there is any science man really needs it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man.
Immanuel Kant
#26. A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
Immanuel Kant
#27. Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Immanuel Kant
#28. Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.
Immanuel Kant
#29. All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.
Immanuel Kant
#30. 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
#31. Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
Immanuel Kant
#32. In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.
Immanuel Kant
#33. But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
Immanuel Kant
#34. 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
#35. Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.
Immanuel Kant
#36. 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
#37. Marriage ... is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.
Immanuel Kant
#38. All so-called moral interest consists simply in respect for the law.
Immanuel Kant
#39. Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.
Immanuel Kant
#40. 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
#41. Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything
Immanuel Kant
#42. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
Immanuel Kant
#43. But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.
Immanuel Kant
#44. Human reason goes forth inexorably to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason or principles based on it.
Immanuel Kant
#45. The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.
Immanuel Kant
#46. Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts; mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts.
Immanuel Kant
#47. The doctrine of morals is an autonomy of practical reason, while the doctrine of virtue is at the same time an autocracy of practical reason.
Immanuel Kant
#48. The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.
Immanuel Kant
#49. If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
Immanuel Kant
#50. Every human being should always be treated as an end and never as a mere instrument.
Immanuel Kant
#51. From the crooked timber of humanity, a straight board cannot be hewn.
Immanuel Kant
#53. No state at war with another state should engage in hostilities of such a kind as to render mutual confidence impossible when peace will have been made.
Immanuel Kant
#55. From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Immanuel Kant
#56. Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a general law of nature.
Immanuel Kant
#57. 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
#58. Maximum individuality within maximum community
Immanuel Kant
#59. Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.
Immanuel Kant
#60. [R]eason is ... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will ...
Immanuel Kant
#61. Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?
Immanuel Kant
#62. A learned woman might just as well have a beard, for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives.
Immanuel Kant
#63. In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.
Immanuel Kant
#64. I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.
Immanuel Kant
#65. An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Immanuel Kant
#66. 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
#67. All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
Immanuel Kant
#68. Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.
Immanuel Kant
#69. What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown
Immanuel Kant
#70. Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes
Immanuel Kant
#71. 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
#72. Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor
Immanuel Kant
#73. The world will by no means perish by a diminution in the number of evil men.
Immanuel Kant
#74. The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
Immanuel Kant
#75. Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.
Immanuel Kant
#76. Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
Immanuel Kant
#77. 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
#78. Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.
Immanuel Kant
#79. I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.
Immanuel Kant
#80. 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
#81. ...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
#82. So act that anything you do may become universal law.
Immanuel Kant
#83. Men will not understand ... that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their
actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise.
Immanuel Kant
#84. Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.
Immanuel Kant
#85. All duties depend as regards the kind of obligation (not the object of their action) upon the one principle.
Immanuel Kant
#86. If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.
Immanuel Kant
#87. 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
#88. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.
Immanuel Kant
#89. Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
Immanuel Kant
#90. What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
Immanuel Kant
#91. All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.
Immanuel Kant
#92. 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
#93. ...[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
#94. The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
Immanuel Kant
#95. If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.
Immanuel Kant
#96. Notion without intuition is empty, intuition without notion is blind.
Immanuel Kant
#97. Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.
Immanuel Kant
#98. The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE
Immanuel Kant
#99. Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.
Immanuel Kant
#100. For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
Immanuel Kant
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