Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.
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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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Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.
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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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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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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 a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
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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 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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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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How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
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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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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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The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
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Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
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Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
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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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The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE.
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Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
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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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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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Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.
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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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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.