Immanuel Kant Quotes (75 Quotes)

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

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.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

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.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.

The death of dogma is the birth of reality.

There is ... but one categorical imperative Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is to be avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the 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.

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.

With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.

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.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

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.

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.

The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.

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.

Morality is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we are to be worthy of happiness.

The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

I had to set limits to knowledge in order to make place for faith.

Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.

Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, also presaged the feasibility of an evolutionary theory The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common structure, which seems to be fundamental not only in their sk.

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.

Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end.

... as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe that feeling will help them out, even in what concerns general laws and besides, feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil, nor has any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings....

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

To be is to do.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

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.'

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?

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

That Logic has advanced in this sure course, even from the earliest times, is apparent from the fact that, since Aristotle, it has been unable to advance a step, and thus to all appearance has reached its completion.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

I ought, therefore I can.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.

Have patience awhile slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time ere long she shall appear to vindicate thee.

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.

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.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.