Immanuel Kant Quotations

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

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.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

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.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

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.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

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.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

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?

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason

Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another

To be fully comfortable to the principle of right, the form of government must be representative. This is the only one that permits republicanism, without which the government is arbitrary and despotic, whatever the constitution may be.

I learned to honor human beings, and I would find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart to all others a value establishing the rights of humanity.

I feel a complete thirst for knowledge and an eager unrest to go further in it as well as satisfaction at every acquisition. There was a time when I believed that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I had contempt for the ignorant rabble who know nothing.

I am myself by inclination an investigator.

We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.

Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.

The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement.

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.

Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.

An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.

Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.

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.

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

Beneficence is a duty.

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.

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.

Ich solle niemals anders verfahren, als so, dass ich auch wollen k o« nne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden. I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.

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.

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. Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Maturity is having the courage to use one's own intelligence!

[Aristotle formal logic thus far (1787)] has not been able to advance a single step, and hence is to all appearances closed and completed.

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.

Reason can never prove the existence of God.

Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.

Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.

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.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

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.

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.

Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.

A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.

Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.

Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings

Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done

All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.

Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy) Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism) Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism) Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.

In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.

Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.

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.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence."

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.

So act that anything you do may become universal law.

The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.

To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.

Deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount; and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.

The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.

A science of all these possible kinds of space [the higher dimensional ones] would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry... If it is possible that there could be regions with other dimensions, it is very likely that God has somewhere brought them into being.

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

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.

What are the aims which are at the same time duties? They are perfecting of ourselves, the happiness of others.