Immanuel Kant Quotes
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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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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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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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Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
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Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.
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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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How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
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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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So act that anything you do may become universal law.
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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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All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
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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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The only thing permanent is change.
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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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Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources.
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We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
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In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.
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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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A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.
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There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
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Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.
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Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
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Beneficence is a duty.