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Immanuel Kant

177 quotes

• “The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1775 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 955

• “Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 1017

• “The body is a temple.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1043 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 1043

• “Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology, and first establishes a Theology; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology, which is incapable of any definite concept.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1892) Tr. J.H. Bernard

• “Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition). Chapter: GENERAL DIVISION OF JURISPRUDENCE.

• “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “...aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1784 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6.

• “...happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1785 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785), Second Section.

• “Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1795 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)

• “Beneficence is a duty. He who often practices this, and sees his beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love him whom he has benefited. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," this does not mean, "Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of love (in the next place) do him good"; but: "Do good to thy neighbour, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men (as a settled habit of inclination to beneficence).”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1780 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1780). Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, translation available at Philosophy.eserver.org. From section "Preliminary Notions of the Susceptibility of the Mind for Notions of Duty Gen…

• “There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are:”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “# Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval;”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “# Civil equality, as the right of the citizen to recognize no one as a superior among the people in relation to himself...; and”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “# Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1797 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Science of Right (1797)

• “Men will not understand … that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 207

• “Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first seen 1646 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: This quote has been misattributed to Kant since the late 19th century, but it is actually from The Balm of Gilead by Joseph Hall (1646), the section "Comfort from the short life of slander".

  Also quoted by: Immanuel Kant (misattributed)

• “The death of dogma is the birth of morality.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in Faith Or Fact (1897) by Henry Moorehouse Taber, p. 86

• “By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another … has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. … makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93

• “Tibet... this is the highest country. No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known is almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The mind intent upon resolving as well as compounding the concept of a composite demands and presumes boundaries in which it may acquiesce in the former as well as in the latter direction.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The force of the word World, as commonly used, of itself falls in with us. For no one will attribute accidents to the World as parts, but as determinations, states; hence the so-called world of the ego, unrestrained by the single substance and its accidents, is not very appositely called a World, unless, perhaps, an imaginary one.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Percepts and phenomena which precedes the logical use of the intellect is called appearance, while the reflex knowledge originating from several appearances compared by the intellect is called experience.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The sensuous may be exceedingly distinct, while intellectual concepts are extremely confused. The former we observe in the prototype of sensuous knowledge geometry; the latter, in the organon of all intellectual concepts, metaphysics. It is evident how much toil the latter is expending to dispel the fogs of confusion darkening the common intellect, though not always with the happy success of the former science.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Now the maximum of perfection is called ideal, by Plato, Idea — for instance, his Idea of a Republic — and is the principle of all that is contained under the general notion of any perfection, inasmuch as the lesser grades are not thought determinable but by limiting the maximum. But God, the Ideal of perfection, and hence the principle of cognition, is also, as existing really, the principle of the creation of all perfection.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Phenomena of the external sense are examined and set forth in physics; those of the internal sense in empirical psychology. Pure mathematics considers space in geometry and time in pure mechanics. To these is to be added a certain concept, intellectual to be sure in itself, but whose becoming actual in the concrete requires the auxiliary notions of time and space in the successive addition and simultaneous juxtaposition of separate units, which is the concept of number treated in arithmetic.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Those who assert the objective reality of time either conceive of it as a continuous flow in what exists, without, however, any existing thing, as is done especially by the English philosophers, an absurd fiction, or as something real abstracted from the succession of inner states, as it has been put by Leibnitz and his followers.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is absurd to excite reason against the primary postulates of pure time, as, for example, continuity, etc., since they follow from laws prior and superior to which nothing is found, and since reason herself in the use of the principle of contradiction cannot dispense with the support of this concept, so primitive and original is it.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The concept of space is not abstracted from external sensations.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Nature, therefore, is subject with absolute precision to all the precepts of geometry as to all the properties of space there demonstrated, this being the subjective condition, not hypothetically but intuitively given, of every phenomenon in which nature can ever be revealed to the senses.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The sham cause in physical influence consists in rashly assuming that the commerce of substance and transitive forces is sufficiently knowable from their mere existence. Hence it is not so much a system as rather the neglect of all philosophical system as a superfluity in the argument. Freeing the concept from this defect, we shall have a species of commerce alone deserving to be called real, and from which the whole constituting the world merits being called real, and not ideal or imaginary.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Several actual worlds without one another are not, therefore, impossible by the very concept, as Wolf hastily concluded from the notion of a complex or multiplicity which he deemed sufficient to a whole, as such, but only on condition that there exist but one necessary cause of all things. If several are admitted, several worlds without one another will be possible in the strictest metaphysical sense.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A spurious axiom of the first class is: Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To these spurious principles must be added some others of great affinity with them… First, that by which we assume that everything in the universe is done according to the order of nature, which principle by Epicurus was proclaimed without any restriction, and by all other philosophers unanimously with extremely rare exceptions, not to be admitted but from supreme necessity.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The second is the partiality for unity proper to the philosophical mind, whence this wide-spread canon has flown forth: principles are not to be multiplied beyond supreme necessity, to which we give in our adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the world either by reason or experience, but as seeking it by an impulse of the intellect which seems to itself to have by thus much advanced in the explication of phenomena, by as much as it is granted to it to descend from the same principle to a greater number of consequences,”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Mut dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurtheilt u. s. w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire "beautiful sex," should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous. After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men...”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.”

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1724–1804) said by 1804 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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