-
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.
Immanuel Kant -
Manners or etiquette ('accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior') call for no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues. Even though manners are no virtues, they are a means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crude elements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and the more capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles.
Immanuel Kant
-
Physicians think they are doing something for you by labeling what you have as a disease.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.
Immanuel Kant -
The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
Immanuel Kant
-
Always regard every man as an end in himself, and never use him merely as a means to your ends [i.e., respect that each person has a life and purpose that is their own; do not treat people as objects to be exploited].
Immanuel Kant -
In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.
Immanuel Kant -
There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
Immanuel Kant -
It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.
Immanuel Kant -
A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.
Immanuel Kant -
The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.
Immanuel Kant
-
This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.
Immanuel Kant -
The only thing permanent is change.
Immanuel Kant -
The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth.
Immanuel Kant -
Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
Immanuel Kant -
[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.
Immanuel Kant -
Cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened.
Immanuel Kant
-
If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
Immanuel Kant -
Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.
Immanuel Kant -
Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant