Immanuel Kant Quotes

The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.

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.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.

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

This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.

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

A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.

If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.

The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

Maximum individuality within maximum community

Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.

The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement.

There is nothing higher than reason.

I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her percepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life.

When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.

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

[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.

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?

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

Always regard every man as an end in himself, and never use him merely as a means to your ends [i.e., respect that each person has a life and purpose that is their own; do not treat people as objects to be exploited].

Perpetual Peace is only found in the graveyard.

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

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

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

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

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.

Every human being should always be treated as an end and never as a mere instrument.

If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.

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

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

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

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

***Three Conditions of Happiness*** If you have work to do If you have someone you love If You have hope Then You are Happy now!

This can never become popular, and, indeed, has no occasion to be so; for fine-spun arguments in favour of useful truths make just as little impression on the public mind as the equally subtle objections brought against these truths. On the other hand, since both inevitably force themselves on every man who rises to the height of speculation, it becomes the manifest duty of the schools to enter upon a thorough investigation of the rights of speculative reason, and thus to prevent the scandal which metaphysical controversies are sure, sooner or later, to cause even to the masses.

Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.

A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.

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

Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

Do the right thing because it is right.

The only thing permanent is change.

Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length. Here, however, we probably confuse our participation in the mirth of a little creature that we love, with the beauty of its song; for if this were exactly imitated by man (as sometimes the notes of the nightingale are) it would seem to our ear quite devoid of taste.

Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything

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

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.

We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle "nature". We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.

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

One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.

Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).

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

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.