Immanuel Kant Quotes
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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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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 perception is colored by emotion.
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Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done.
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All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.
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What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?
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Every human being should always be treated as an end and never as a mere instrument.
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The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.
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I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
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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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Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.
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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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Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
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Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.
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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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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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Human reason is by nature architectonic.
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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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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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The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.
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Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.
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One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
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The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.