Immanuel Kant Quotes

“There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.”

“I learned to honor human beings, and I would find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart to all others a value establishing the rights of humanity.”

“Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representations of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish glow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind.”

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

“Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.”

“An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.”

“In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.”

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

“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.”

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

“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”

“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.”

“Manners or etiquette ('accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior') call for no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues. Even though manners are no virtues, they are a means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crude elements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and the more capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles.”

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”

“Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.”

“So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.”

“Human reason is by nature architectonic.”

“Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.”

“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.”

“Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.”

“Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.”

“It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.”

“Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.”

“A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.”

“Beneficence is a duty.”