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?

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

The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason

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.

The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.

For how is it possible, says that acute man, that when a concept is given me, I can go beyond it and connect with it another which is not contained in it, in such a manner as if that latter necessarily belonged to the former?

If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.

Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

All perception is colored by emotion.

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.

Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything

No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law ? i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.

The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt

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.

The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.

The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.

If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death.

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length. Here, however, we probably confuse our participation in the mirth of a little creature that we love, with the beauty of its song; for if this were exactly imitated by man (as sometimes the notes of the nightingale are) it would seem to our ear quite devoid of taste.

Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.

We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle "nature". We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know!

Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.

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.

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!

Laziness and cowardice explain why so many men. . . remain under a life-long tutelage and why it is so easy for some men to set themselves up as the guardians of all the rest. . . If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides my diet, I need not trouble myself. If I am willing to pay, I need not think. Others will do it for me.

Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.'

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.

Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.

An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.

Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.

It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.

To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized - perhaps too much for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality - for that, much is lacking.

It is through education that all the good in the world arises.

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.

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.

[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights.

Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.

God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.

Ghost stories are always listened to and well received in private, but pitilessly disavowed in public. For my own part, ignorant as I am of the way in which the human spirit enters the world and the way in which he goes out of it, I dare not deny the truth of many such narratives.

Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace.

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.

The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing which humanity ever experienced.

One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.

Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?

Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.

If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is to be avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.

It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

***Three Conditions of Happiness*** If you have work to do If you have someone you love If You have hope Then You are Happy now!

If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.

There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise.

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.

Great minds think for themselves.

Do what is right, though the world may perish.

It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.