Immanuel Kant Quotes
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So act that anything you do may become universal law.
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I learned to honor human beings, and I would find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart to all others a value establishing the rights of humanity.
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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.
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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.
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In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
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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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Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representations of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish glow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind.
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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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Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
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In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.
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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].
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Honesty is better than any policy.
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Beneficence is a duty.
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All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
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When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any.
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The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
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Art is purposiveness without purpose.
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The only thing permanent is change.
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Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
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Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.
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Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
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It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.
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Physicians think they are doing something for you by labeling what you have as a disease.
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At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world.