Immanuel Kant Quotes

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

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”

“Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.”

“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.”

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

“I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.”

“Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.”

“Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.”

“All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.”

“Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.”

“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.”

“The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”

“Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.”

“Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.”

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

“Honesty is better than any policy.”

“Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience.”

“We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism.”

“When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any”

“It is the Land of Truth (enchanted name!), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the true home of illusion, where many a fog bank and ice, that soon melts away, tempt us to believe in new lands, while constantly deceiving the adventurous mariner with vain hopes, and involving him in adventures which he can never leave, yet never bring to an end.”

“The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.”

“It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.”

“All perception is colored by emotion.”

“To be is to do.”