Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgment (1790) offer an analysis of speculative and moral reason and the faculty of human judgment. He exerted an immense influence on the intellectual movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. European philosophy is generally divided into pre-Kantian and post-Kantian schools of thought.
Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, to Lutheran parents, Kant studied theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy at university. He lectured at the University of Königsberg for 15 years until he was eventually given a tenured position as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770.
In his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued against Empiricism (the mind was a blank slate to be filled with observations of the physical world) and against Rationalism (it was possible to experience the world objectively without the interference of the mind.) He synthesized those two schools of philosophy—he asserted that the conscious mind must process and organize our perceptions, and made a distinction between the natural worlds as we observe it and the natural world as it is.
In The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant affirmed the existence of absolute moral law, the categorical imperative of morality dictated by actions based on rightness. Kant viewed morality as something that arises from human reason; he maintained that an action’s goodness is determined not by the outcome of the action, but by the motive behind it.
Kant also wrote several essays in support of religious liberalism and the Enlightenment.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Immanuel Kant
There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God, and freewill, and immortality arise.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Faith
Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Arguments
By a lie, a man…annihilates his dignity as a man.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying
Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Sincerity
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Strength, Principles, Action, Advice, Example
Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
—Immanuel Kant
Riches ennoble a man’s circumstances, but not himself.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Riches
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
Topics: Animals
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Philosophy
Suppose someone asserts of his lustful appetite that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible. Ask him if a gallows were erected before the house where he finds this opportunity, in order that he should be hanged thereon immediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not then control his passion; we need not be long in doubt what he would reply. Ask him, however, if his sovereign ordered him, on the pain of the same immediate execution, to bear false witness against an honourable man, whom the prince might wish to destroy under a plausible pretext, would he consider it possible in that case to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to affirm whether he would do so or not, but he would unhesitatingly admit that it is possible to do so. He judges, therefore, that he can do a certain thing because he is conscious that he ought, and he recognizes that he is free—a fact which but for the moral law he would never have known.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Choice
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Doing Your Best, Action, Living
Confidence in the principles of an enemy must remain even during war, otherwise a peace could never be concluded; and hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination since war in fact is but the sad resource employed in a state of nature in defence of rights; force standing there in lieu of juridical tribunals. Neither of the two parties can be accused of injustice, since for that purpose a juridical decision would be necessary. But here the event of a battle (as formerly the judgments of God) determines the justice of either party; since between states there cannot be a war of punishment no subordination existing between them. A war, therefore, which might cause the destruction of both parties at once, together with the annihilation of every right, would permit the conclusion of a perpetual peace only upon the vast burial-ground of the human species.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: War
Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one’s means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Economy
Always so act that the immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Influence
The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Busy
It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honorably.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Happiness
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Happiness
What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Hope
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Experience
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.
—Immanuel Kant
The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Power
Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Discipline
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.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Critics, Criticism
The greatest human quest is to know
what one must do in order to become a human being.
—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 not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Happiness
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means but always also as an end.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Action
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
Topics: Man, Mankind
It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.
—Immanuel Kant
The death of dogma is the birth of reality.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Change
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Life and Living
Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived.—Truth is the child of time; ere long she shall appear to vindicate thee.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Slander
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
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Honesty is better than any policy.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Honesty
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Humanity
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Suicide
Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Action
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Honesty
Morality is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we are to be worthy of happiness
—Immanuel Kant
Topics: Morality
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s mind without another’s guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
—Immanuel Kant
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