Immanuel Kant Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

Arrogance is, as it were, a solicitation on the part of one seeking honor for followers, whom he thinks he is entitled to treat with contempt.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.

Immanuel Kant
Pure mathematics can never deal with the possibility, that is to say, with the possibility of an intuition answering to the conceptions of the things. Hence it cannot touch the question of cause and effect, and consequently, all the finality there observed must always be regarded simply as formal, and never as a physical end.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
I feel a complete thirst for knowledge and an eager unrest to go further in it as well as satisfaction at every acquisition. There was a time when I believed that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I had contempt for the ignorant rabble who know nothing.

Immanuel Kant
Time was, when she [metaphysics] was the queen of all the sciences; and, if we take the will for the deed, she certainly deserves, so far as regards the high importance of her object-matter, this title of honor. Now, it is the fashion of the time to heap contempt and scorn upon her.

Immanuel Kant
The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.

Immanuel Kant
Deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount; and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

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

Immanuel Kant
If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.

Immanuel Kant
All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.

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

Immanuel Kant
All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.

Immanuel Kant
Chemistry can become nothing more than a systematic art or experimental doctrine, but never a science proper.

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

Immanuel Kant