Immanuel Kant Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
-
The only thing permanent is change.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE.
-
Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.
-
Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.
-
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.
-
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
-
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
-
There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
-
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
-
Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
-
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.
-
The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
-
Beneficence is a duty.
-
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
-
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.