Immanuel Kant Quotes

“Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”

“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.”

“Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”

“Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”

“Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.”

“Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings”

“In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.”

“cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened.”

“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.”

“A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.”

“Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.”

“In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.”

“Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.”

“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.”

“Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.”

“Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.”

“Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.”

“Art is purposiveness without purpose.”

“Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.”

“But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.”

“The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.”

“Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.”

“Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes”

“You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am”

“Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.”