Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.
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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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There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are:
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Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
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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 me and the moral law within me.
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Deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount; and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.
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Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
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Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
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If, like Hume, I had all manner of adornment in my power, I would still have reservations about using them. It is true that some readers will be scared off by dryness. But isn't it necessary to scare off some if in their case the matter would end up in bad hands?
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Maximum individuality within maximum community.
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This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.
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Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
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Notion without intuition is empty, intuition without notion is blind.
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The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.
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Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.
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Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.
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[Aristotle formal logic thus far (1787)] has not been able to advance a single step, and hence is to all appearances closed and completed.
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Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.
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Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
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But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
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Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.
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Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility.
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Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.'
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Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.