Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
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The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.
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Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know!
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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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Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.
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Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.
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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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When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.
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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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Maximum individuality within maximum community.
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Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.
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All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.
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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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Ghost stories are always listened to and well received in private, but pitilessly disavowed in public. For my own part, ignorant as I am of the way in which the human spirit enters the world and the way in which he goes out of it, I dare not deny the truth of many such narratives.
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Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
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Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.
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Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.
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Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles. ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions.
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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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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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The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing which humanity ever experienced.
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Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
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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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Here I shall add that the concept of change, and with it the concept of motion, as change of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time. & Motion, for example, presupposes the perception of something movable. But space considered in itself contains nothing movable; consequently motion must be something which is found in space only through experience -in other words, is an empirical datum.