Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.
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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.
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Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility.
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Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles. ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions.
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Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
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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.
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How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
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All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.
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Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
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Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.
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Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.
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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.
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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.
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We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.
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[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.
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The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
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THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.
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Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.
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So act that anything you do may become universal law.
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Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy) Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism) Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism) Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)
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If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
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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.
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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.
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By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.