Immanuel Kant Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
-
With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.
-
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.
-
If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
-
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.
-
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.
-
An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
-
Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
-
Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.
-
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.
-
So act that anything you do may become universal law.
-
Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
-
Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
-
The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
-
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.
-
Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
-
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.
-
There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
-
Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.