Immanuel Kant Quotes
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All perception is colored by emotion.
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Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.
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Do the right thing because it is right.
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The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.
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The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.
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I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
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Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
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Die menschliche Vernunft hat hier, wie allerwärts in ihrem reinen Gebrauche, so lange es ihr an Kritik fehlt, vorher alle mögliche unrechte Wege versucht, ehe es ihr gelingt, den einzigen wahren zu treffen.
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Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.
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Human reason is by nature architectonic.
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Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
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it is absurd … to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass ('Dialectic of Teleological Judgment' §75)
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Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.
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All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
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Do what is right, though the world may perish.
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What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?
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Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
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The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.
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The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.
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Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurtheilt u. s. w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann.
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A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
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I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
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A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
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One cannot avoid a certain feeling of disgust, when one observes the actions of man displayed on the great stage of the world. Wisdom is manifested by individuals here and there; but the web of human history as a whole appears to be woven from folly and childish vanity, often, too, from puerile wickedness and love of destruction: with the result that at the end one is puzzled to know what idea to form of our species which prides itself so much on its advantages.