Immanuel Kant Quotes
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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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The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth.
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Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.
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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.
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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.
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A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.
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Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.
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Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.
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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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Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.
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Maturity is having the courage to use one's own intelligence!
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One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.
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Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?
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[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.
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A science of all these possible kinds of space [the higher dimensional ones] would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry... If it is possible that there could be regions with other dimensions, it is very likely that God has somewhere brought them into being.
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Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end.
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The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.
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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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Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.
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[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.
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I feel a complete thirst for knowledge and an eager unrest to go further in it as well as satisfaction at every acquisition. There was a time when I believed that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I had contempt for the ignorant rabble who know nothing.
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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.
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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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An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.