Immanuel Kant Quotes
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One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
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Prudence approaches, conscience accuses.
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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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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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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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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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Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.
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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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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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Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
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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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Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.
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Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
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Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).
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Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.
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The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.
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No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law ? i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.
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In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.
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This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject.
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From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
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If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.
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The human heart refuses To believe in a universe Without a purpose.