Immanuel Kant Quotes (75 Quotes)

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

To be fully comfortable to the principle of right, the form of government must be representative. This is the only one that permits republicanism, without which the government is arbitrary and despotic, whatever the constitution may be.

I am never to act without willing that the maxim by which I act should become a universal law.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Human reason is by nature architectonic.

Thus no member of the commonwealth can have a hereditary privilege as against his fellow-subjects and no-one can hand down to his descendants the privileges attached to the rank he occupies in the commonwealth, nor act as if he were qualified as a ruler by birth and forcibly prevent others from reaching the higher levels of the hierarchy through their own merit. He may hand down everything else, so long as it is material and not pertaining to his person, for it may be acquired and disposed of as property and may over a series of generations create considerable inequalities in wealth among the members of the commonwealt. But he may not prevent his subordinates from raising themselves to his own level if they are able and entitled to do so by their talent, industry and good fortune. If this were not so, he would be allowed to practise coercion without himself being subject to coercive counter-measures from others, and would thus be more than their fellow-subject.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

Prudence reproaches conscience accuses.

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.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

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.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another

Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it God prohibits it because it is abominable.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

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.