Immanuel Kant quotes - page 4

A person who already displays ... cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals. (Immanuel Kant)
Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.
Immanuel Kant
It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him.
Immanuel Kant
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.
Immanuel Kant
To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized - perhaps too much for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality.
Immanuel Kant
Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.
Immanuel Kant
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
Immanuel Kant
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
Immanuel Kant
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.
Immanuel Kant
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
Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person. (Immanuel Kant)
Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.
Immanuel Kant
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.
Immanuel Kant
But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
Immanuel Kant
Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
Immanuel Kant
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
Immanuel Kant
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.
Immanuel Kant
In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
Immanuel Kant
An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Immanuel Kant
I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.
Immanuel Kant
The Palestinians living among us have, for the most part, earned a not unfounded reputation for being cheaters, because of their spirit of usury since their exile. Certainly, it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheaters; but it is just as odd to think of a nation of merchants, the great majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping the people among whom they find refuge, and even one another. The situation could not be otherwise, given a whole nation of merchants, as non-productive members of society. (Immanuel Kant)
In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.
Immanuel Kant
This problem is the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.
Immanuel Kant
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
Immanuel Kant
The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.
Immanuel Kant