Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.
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When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.
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Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.
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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.
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Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.
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If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
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Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
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If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
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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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How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
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We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.
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Arrogance is, as it were, a solicitation on the part of one seeking honor for followers, whom he thinks he is entitled to treat with contempt.
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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.
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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.
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Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
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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.
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Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
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Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
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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.
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The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE.
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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.
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So act that anything you do may become universal law.
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An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
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Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.