Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Reason can never prove the existence of God.
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There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
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I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.
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...as soon as we examine suicide from the standpoint of religion we immediately see it in its true light. We have been placed in this world under certain conditions and for specific purposes. But a suicide opposes the purpose of his creator; he arrives in the other world as one who has deserted his post; he must be looked upon as a rebel against God. God is our owner; we are his property; his providence works for our good.
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Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
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There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right.
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Freedom can never be comprehended, nor even can insight into it be gained.
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Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.
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Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.
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Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.
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It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.
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A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.
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The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
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THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.
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[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights.
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Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.
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I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.
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To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
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The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.
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Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
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We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space.
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There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are:
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If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.
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Maximum individuality within maximum community.