-
When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant
-
Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
Immanuel Kant -
Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
...as soon as we examine suicide from the standpoint of religion we immediately see it in its true light. We have been placed in this world under certain conditions and for specific purposes. But a suicide opposes the purpose of his creator; he arrives in the other world as one who has deserted his post; he must be looked upon as a rebel against God. God is our owner; we are his property; his providence works for our good.
Immanuel Kant
-
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant -
Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
Immanuel Kant -
Beneficence is a duty.
Immanuel Kant
-
Marriage...is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.
Immanuel Kant -
Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.
Immanuel Kant -
Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
Immanuel Kant -
Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant -
An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
Immanuel Kant
-
Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
Immanuel Kant -
There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise.
Immanuel Kant -
[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.
Immanuel Kant -
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.
Immanuel Kant