Immanuel Kant Quotes

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

What are the aims which are at the same time duties? They are perfecting of ourselves, the happiness of others.

Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility

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.

Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.

Act in such a way that you will be worthy of being happy.

Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.

Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.

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

Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.

Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done

Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.

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

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.

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

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights.

Animals... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.

The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.

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

Notion without intuition is empty, intuition without notion is blind.

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.

I assert that, in any particular natural science, one encounters genuine scientific substance only to the extent that mathematics is present.

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.

All our knowledge begins with the senses...

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

I am myself by inclination an investigator.

We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.

Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him.

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.'

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

There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.

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

We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.

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.

A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.

So act that anything you do may become universal law.

An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.

At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world.

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.