Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

37 Sourced Quotes

View all Immanuel Kant Quotes
All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Immanuel Kant
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?

Immanuel Kant
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
It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.

Immanuel Kant
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.

Immanuel Kant
Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.

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

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

Immanuel Kant
It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

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
The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause.

Immanuel Kant
Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

Immanuel Kant
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

Immanuel Kant
Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.

Immanuel Kant
Mathematical judgments are always synthetical.

Immanuel Kant
Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences of reason, which have to determine their objects a priori.

Immanuel Kant
The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement.

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 science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

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

Immanuel Kant
Things which we see are not by themselves what we see... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

Immanuel Kant
That Logic has advanced in this sure course, even from the earliest times, is apparent from the fact that, since Aristotle, it has been unable to advance a step, and thus to all appearance has reached its completion.

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

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

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

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

Immanuel Kant
Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

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

Immanuel Kant