Immanuel Kant Quotes

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.

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

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

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

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.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

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

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.

Thus no member of the commonwealth can have a hereditary privilege as against his fellow-subjects; and no-one can hand down to his descendants the privileges attached to the rank he occupies in the commonwealth, nor act as if he were qualified as a ruler by birth and forcibly prevent others from reach­ing the higher levels of the hierarchy through their own merit. He may hand down everything else, so long as it is material and not pertaining to his person, for it may be acquired and disposed of as property and may over a series of generations create considerable inequalities in wealth among the mem­bers of the commonwealt. But he may not prevent his sub­ordinates from raising themselves to his own level if they are able and entitled to do so by their talent, industry and good fortune. If this were not so, he would be allowed to practise coercion without himself being subject to coercive counter-measures from others, and would thus be more than their fellow-subject.

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?

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy