Immanuel Kant Quotes
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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 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.
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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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Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.
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All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.
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Prudence approaches, conscience accuses.
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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.
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So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
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In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.
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Thus our duties to animals are indirectly duties to humanity.
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Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.
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Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
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All our knowledge begins with the senses...
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The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.
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Die Verehrung mächtiger unsichtbarer Wesen, welche dem hülflosen Menschen durch die natürliche, auf dem Bewusstsein seines Unvermögens gegründete Furcht abgenöthigt wurde, …
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Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.
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Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
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Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.
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There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.
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I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.
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There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.
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Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.
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From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
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Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.