Quotes By Immanuel Kant

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

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

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

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

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

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

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

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

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

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

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.

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

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

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

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

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.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.