Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers.
Born in Königsberg, Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy
Quotes
Do the right thing because it is right.
Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am.
Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.
The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.
Dare to think!
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
Beneficence is a duty.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
But a lie is a lie, and in itself intrinsically evil, whether it be told with good or bad intents.
There is nothing higher than reason.
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
All perception is colored by emotion.
Great minds think for themselves.
If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
Reason can never prove the existence of God.
A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.
Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
The human heart refuses to believe in a universe without a purpose.
Perpetual Peace is only found in the graveyard.
The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.
An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.
It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.
Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything.
Do what is right, though the world may perish.
Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.
Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.
If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
Art is purposiveness without purpose.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.
Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.
One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.
The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.
Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.
It is through education that all the good in the world arises.
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.
Animals… are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.
Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.
Habe den Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen.
All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.
God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.
Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
Maximum individuality within maximum community.
The hand is the visible part of the brain.
Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.
Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.
Maturity is having the courage to use one’s own intelligence.
Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done.
Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
Human reason is by nature architectonic.
Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.
Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
So act that anything you do may become universal law.
Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment.
The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing which humanity ever experienced.
Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.
Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience.
Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.
Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
Freedom is the opposite of necessity.
Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.
Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end.
It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.
Honesty is better than any policy.
Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
Riches ennoble a man’s circumstances, but not himself.
I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.
By a lie, a man… annihilates his dignity as a man.
Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings.
The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.
Act in such a way that you will be worthy of being happy.