Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is a central figure in modern philosophy. His influence extends to not only to philosophy itself, but also to the social sciences and humanities in general. Below you will find our collection of inspirational and wise Immanuel Kant quotes.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
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.
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another.
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
If man makes himself a worm, he must not complain when he is trodden on.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.
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.’
Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.
I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.
Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
The senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.
Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.
I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him.
Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last.
Man’s greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.
Thus our duties to animals are indirectly duties to humanity.
