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Quotes of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment.
- Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
- A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
- All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
- All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
- All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
- Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.
- But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
- By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.
- Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
- Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
- From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
- Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
- He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
- I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
- If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
- Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
- In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
- Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.
- Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.
- It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.
- It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
- It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
- Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
- May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.
- Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
- Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
- Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
- Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.
- Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.
- Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
- Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
- So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
- The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.
- Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
- To be is to do.
- Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
- Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.
- Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
- What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?