Immanuel Kant Quotes
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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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Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
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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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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.
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Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.
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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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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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Art is purposiveness without purpose.
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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.
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Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.
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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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Notion without intuition is empty, intuition without notion is blind.
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All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
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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.
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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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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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Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.
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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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Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
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Beneficence is a duty.
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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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Physicians think they are doing something for you by labeling what you have as a disease.
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Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.
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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.