Immanuel Kant (born 22 April 1724, Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia [present-day Kaliningrad, Russia] – died 12 February 1804, Königsberg, East Prussia, Kingdom of Prussia) was a German philosopher and scientist. His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was one of the central Enlightenment thinkers and arguably one of the greatest philosophers of all time.
Top 10 Most Famous Immanuel Kant Quotes to Inspire You
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.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.Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.Look closely. The beautiful may be small.Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
42 Enlightening Immanuel Kant quotes on Happiness, Life, Ethics, and Freedom (WISDOM)
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.The death of dogma is the birth of morality.An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild…How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
But to unite in a permanent religious institution which is not to be subject to doubt before the public even in the lifetime of one man, and thereby to make a period of time fruitless in the progress of mankind toward improvement, thus working to the disadvantage of posterity - that is absolutely forbidden. For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind.
Immanuel Kant
If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
Immanuel Kant
Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.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.Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!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.There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one’s means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty.Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.By a lie a man throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity as a man.So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.Have the courage to use your own reason – that is the motto of enlightenment.A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.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.Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything.It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.If we knew that god exists, such knowledge would make morality impossible. For, if we acted morally from fear or fright, or confident of a reward, then this would not be moral. It would be enlightened selfishness.I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.