Immanuel Kant Quotes
-
We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism.
-
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.
-
Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
-
Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
-
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.
-
Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.
-
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.
-
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.
-
With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.
-
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
-
If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
-
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
-
[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.
-
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.'
-
Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
-
Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy) Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism) Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism) Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)
-
We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.
-
If it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man's character as shown both in inner and in outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.
-
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.
-
THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.
-
Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
-
The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
-
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.
-
So act that anything you do may become universal law.