Quotes by Immanuel Kant

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
– Immanuel Kant
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
– 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
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
Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.
– Immanuel Kant
By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.
– Immanuel Kant
Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
– Immanuel Kant
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
– Immanuel Kant
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
– Immanuel Kant
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
– Immanuel Kant
If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
– Immanuel Kant
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
– Immanuel Kant
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.
– Immanuel Kant
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.
– Immanuel Kant
It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.
– Immanuel Kant
It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
– Immanuel Kant
It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
– Immanuel Kant
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
– Immanuel Kant
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
– Immanuel Kant
Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
– Immanuel Kant
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
– Immanuel Kant
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.
– Immanuel Kant
The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.
– Immanuel Kant
To be is to do.
– Immanuel Kant
Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.
– Immanuel Kant
What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
– Immanuel Kant
Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.
– Immanuel Kant
The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.
– Immanuel Kant
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
– Immanuel Kant
Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.
– Immanuel Kant
I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
– Immanuel Kant
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.
– Immanuel Kant
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
– Immanuel Kant