Immanuel Kant - Knowledge Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

View all Immanuel Kant Quotes
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.

Immanuel Kant
All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

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
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
The sum total of all possible knowledge of God is not possible for a human being, not even through a true revelation. But it is one of the worthiest inquiries to see how far our reason can go in the knowledge of God.

Immanuel Kant
All abstract speculations, all knowledge which is dry, however useful it may be, must be abandoned to the laborious and solid mind of man.... For this reason women will never learn geometry.

Immanuel Kant
In every study of nature there can be only so much genuine science as there is a priori knowledge, by the same token, natural philosophy will contain genuine science only to the extent in which mathematics can be applied to it.

Immanuel Kant
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).

Immanuel Kant
I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge and an impatient eagerness to advance, also satisfaction at each progressive step. There was a time when I thought that all this could constitute the honor of humanity, and I despised the mob, which knows nothing about it. Rousseau set me straight. This dazzling excellence vanishes; I learn to honor men, and would consider myself much less useful than common laborers if I did not believe that this consideration could give all the others a value, to establish the rights of humanity.

Immanuel Kant
I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

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

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

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Immanuel Kant
Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

Immanuel Kant
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

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

Immanuel Kant
Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources.

Immanuel Kant
Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

Immanuel Kant
Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.

Immanuel Kant