Immanuel Kant Quotes
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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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There is nothing higher than reason.
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It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.
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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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Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
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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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The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.
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Physicians think they are doing something for you by labeling what you have as a disease.
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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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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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A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.
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If we could see ourselves... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.
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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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If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
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Honesty is better than any policy.
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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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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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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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Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.
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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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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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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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Maturity is having the courage to use one's own intelligence!
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Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.