Immanuel Kant Quotes: 200 Quotes on Life, Freedom, and the Beauty of Small Details to Inspire and Guide You

“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

“Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end”

Immanuel Kant

People

“In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Judgment

Source: Critique of Judgment

Beauty

“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”

Immanuel Kant

What is Enlightenment? (1784)
Context: Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
Context: Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

“Marriage… is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.”

Immanuel Kant

Marriage , People , Sex

“An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.”

Immanuel Kant

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)
Context: He [Jesus] combines all duties (1) in one universal rule (which includes within itself both the inner and the outer moral relations of men), namely: Perform your duty for no motive other than unconditioned esteem for duty itself, i. e., love God (the Legislator of all duties) above all else; and (2) in a particular rule, that, namely, which concerns man’s external relation to other men as universal duty: Love every one as yourself, i. e., further his welfare from good-will that is immediate and not derived from motives of self-advantage. These commands are not mere laws of virtue but precepts of holiness which we ought to pursue, and the very pursuit of them is called virtue. Accordingly he destroys the hope of all who intend to wait upon this moral goodness quite passively, with their hands in their laps, as though it were a heavenly gift which descends from on high. He who leaves unused the natural predisposition to goodness which lies in human nature (like a talent entrusted to him) in lazy confidence that a higher moral influence will no doubt supply the moral character and completeness which he lacks, is confronted with the threat that even the good which, by virtue of his natural predisposition, he may have done, will not be allowed to stand him in stead because of this neglect (XXV, 29).

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Practical Reason

Variant: Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Source: Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
Context: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite.

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Law

“But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Introduction I. Of the Difference Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Variant: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.
Context: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of them selves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)... It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight,—whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience.

Knowledge

“Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.”

Immanuel Kant

“It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 293, B 350
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Sense

“There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union”

Immanuel Kant

omnitudo collectiva
Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Religion , Teachers , Universe

“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

for example, the Jews in Poland

page 77 of 6 December 2012 publication by Springer Science & Business Media https://books.google.ca/books?id=nRArBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA77, translation by Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974)

page 238 of "Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation" https://books.google.ca/books?id=4EmqLCWUFvEC&pg=PA238 in 1998, page 221 of "Acts of Religion" https://books.google.ca/books?id=c_kgAmFbvP0C&pg=PA221 in 2002, page 235 of "Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine" https://books.google.ca/books?id=CYcOfkrduWYC&pg=PA235 in 2004, page 44 of "Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism" https://books.google.ca/books?id=IYVDMuOFN20C&pg=PA44 in 2005, page 8 of "The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot" https://books.google.ca/books?id=juCYcPWdqccC&pg=PA8 in 2010, page 155 of "Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture" https://books.google.ca/books?id=YMIsYMw0ES0C&pg=PA155 in 2012, page 75 of "Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures" https://books.google.ca/books?id=4svsCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75 in 2016 and page 39 of "Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews" https://books.google.ca/books?id=6kk_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA39 in 2017 also quote this.
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

People , Thinking , Loss , Parting

“The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

B 8
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Feeling , Imagination , Light

“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

…sogar daß ihm auch wohl Philosophen, als einer gewissen Veredelung der Menschheit, eine Lobrede halten, uneingedenk des Ausspruchs jenes Griechen: »Der Krieg ist darin schlimm, daß er mehr böse Leute macht, als er deren wegnimmt«.
As quoted in Philosophical Perspectives on Peace: An Anthology of Classical and Modern Sources (1987) by Howard P. Kainz, p. 81
Eternal Peace (1795)

War , Evil , Forgetting

“In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.”

Immanuel Kant

Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 58
The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

Men , Age , Education , Sex

“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

Im Reiche der Zwecke hat alles entweder einen Preis oder eine Würde. Was einen Preis hat, an dessen Stelle kann auch etwas anderes als Äquivalent gesetzt werden; was dagegen über allen Preis erhaben ist, mithin kein Äquivalent verstattet, das hat eine Würde.
434:32, M. Gregor, trans. (Cambridge: 1998), p. 42
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

“He [Jesus] claims that not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God (Matthew V, 20-48); … that injury done one’s neighbor can be repaired only through satisfaction rendered to the neighbor himself, not through acts of divine worship (V, 24). Thus, he says, does he intend to do full justice to the Jewish law (V, 17); whence it is obvious that not scriptural scholarship but the pure religion of reason must be the law’s interpreter, for taken according to the letter, it allowed the very opposite of all this. Furthermore, he does not leave unnoticed, in his designations of the strait gate and the narrow way, the misconstruction of the law which men allow themselves in order to evade their true moral duty, holding themselves immune through having fulfilled their churchly duty (VII, 13). He further requires of these pure dispositions that they manifest themselves also in works (VII, 16) and, on the other hand, denies the insidious hope of those who imagine that, through invocation and praise of the Supreme Lawgiver in the person of His envoy, they will make up for their lack of good works and ingratiate themselves into favor (VII, 21). Regarding these works he declares that they ought to be performed publicly, as an example for imitation (V, 16), and in a cheerful mood, not as actions extorted from slaves (VI, 16); and that thus, from a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God (XIII, 31-33).”

Immanuel Kant

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Men , God , Religion , Justice

“This problem is the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.”

Immanuel Kant

Sixth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Problem

“If the truth shall kill them, let them die.”

Immanuel Kant

Generally attributed to Kant on social media, this is actually from a quotation by Ayn Rand paraphrasing Kant. Cited in Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand http://books.google.com/books?id=d0tbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22If+the+truth+shall+kill+them,+let+them+die.%22&dq=%22If+the+truth+shall+kill+them,+let+them+die.%22&hl=de&sa=X&ei=6ax9VI6BE4SgyAPw_IKABg&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ (1989) by Nathaniel Brandon.
Misattributed

Truth

“All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i. e. experience. …mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles…”

Immanuel Kant book Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

Mathematics , Nature , Knowledge , Thinking

“All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 146, B 185
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Knowledge

“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

Fifth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Men , Law , Nature , Problem

“It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.”

Immanuel Kant

Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurtheilt u. s. w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann.
What is Enlightenment? (1784)

Books , Understanding , Thinking

“I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for… science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. …the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.”

Immanuel Kant book Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Preface, Tr. https://books.google.com/books?id=OCJLAAAAMAAJ Ernest Belfort Bax (1883)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

Lying , Mathematics , Nature , Knowledge

“Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.”

Immanuel Kant

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883)
(1786)

Nature , Science

“Do what is right, though the world may perish.”

Immanuel Kant

This is quoted as Kant in Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms, Grades 5-12 (2007) by Jeff Zwiers, p. 202, but apparently derives from Kant's arguments in support of the far older Latin proverb Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus — "Do what is right though the world should perish." which was the subject of an essay: "Kant on the Maxim 'Do What Is Right Though the World Should Perish'" by Sissela Bok, in Argumentation 2 (February 1988). There was also a similar latin proverb Fiat iustitia ruat caelum — Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
Misattributed

World

“Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason … because … duty … lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.”

Immanuel Kant

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

World , Idea , Appearance

“Human reason is by nature architectonic.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

B 502
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Nature

“There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Immanuel Kant

Der kategorische Imperativ, der überhaupt nur aussagt, was Verbindlichkeit sei, ist: handle nach einer Maxime, welche zugleich als ein allgemeines Gesetz gelten kann.
Source: Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Ch. 11

Law , Universe , Time

“Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.”

Immanuel Kant

Third Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Nature , Animals , Perfection , Happiness

“For it is extremely absurd to expect to be enlightened by reason, and yet to prescribe to her beforehand on which side she must incline.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 747, B 775; as translated by F. Max Mueller
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer’s question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.”

Immanuel Kant

On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives (1797)

Death , Truth , Lie , Justice

“Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.”

Immanuel Kant

As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 208
Context: As everybody likes to be honoured, so people imagine that God also wants to be honoured. They forget that the fulfilment of duty towards men is the only honour adequate to him. Thus is formed the conception of a religion of worship, instead of a merely moral religion. … Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly. If once a man has come to the idea of a service which is not purely moral, but is supposed to be agreeable to God himself, or capable of propitiating him, there is little difference between the several ways of serving him. For all these ways are of equal value. … Whether the devotee accomplishes his statutory walk to the church, or whether he undertakes a pilgrimage to the sanctuaries of Loretto and Palestine, whether he repeats his prayer-formulas with his lips, or like the Tibetan, uses a prayer-wheel … is quite indifferent. As the illusion of thinking that a man can justify himself before God in any way by acts of worship is religious superstition, so the illusion that he can obtain this justification by the so-called intercourse with God is religious mysticism (Schwärmerei). Such superstition leads inevitably to sacerdotalism (Pfaffenthum) which will always be found where the essence is sought not in principles of morality, but in statutory commandments, rules of faith and observances.

God , Thinking

“There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.”

Immanuel Kant

What is Enlightenment? (1784)

People , Thinking

“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 book Critique of Pure Reason

B 33
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Way

“Let us suppose there was a teacher of whom an historical record (or, at least, a widespread belief which is not basically disputable) reports that he was the first to expound publicly a pure and searching religion, comprehensible to the whole world. … Suppose that all he did was done even in the face of a dominant ecclesiastical faith which was onerous and not conducive to moral ends (a faith whose perfunctory worship can serve as a type of all the other faiths, at bottom merely statutory, which were current in the world at the time). Suppose, further, we find that he had made this universal religion of reason the highest and indispensable condition of every religious faith whatsoever … and this without further adding to this faith burdensome new ordinances or wishing to transform acts which he had initiated into peculiar holy practices, required in themselves as being constituent elements of religion. After this description one will not fail to recognize the person who can be referenced, not indeed as the founder of the religion which, free from every dogma, is engraved in all men’s hearts (for it does not have its origin in an arbitrary will), but as the founder of the first true church.”

Immanuel Kant

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Men , World , Faith , Religion

“Civil equality, as the right of the citizen to recognize no one as a superior among the people in relation to himself…; and”

Immanuel Kant

People

“The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.”

Immanuel Kant

Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Law , Problem , Dependency , Perfection

“The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.”

Immanuel Kant

Eighth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Secret , History , Nature

“Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace.”

Immanuel Kant

Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)

People , World , Peace , Law

“We can indeed recognize a tremendous difference in manner, but not in principle, between a shaman of the Tunguses and a European prelate: … for, as regards principle, they both belong to one and the same class, namely, the class of those who let their worship of God consist in what in itself can never make man better (in faith in certain statutory dogmas or celebration of certain arbitrary observances). Only those who mean to find the service of God solely in the disposition to good life-conduct distinguish themselves from those others, by virtue of having passed over to a wholly different principle.”

Immanuel Kant

Von einem tungusischen Schaman, bis zu dem Kirche und Staat zugleich regierenden europäischen Prälaten … ist zwar ein mächtiger Abstand in der Manier, aber nicht im Prinzip, zu glauben; denn was dieses betrifft, so gehören sie insgesammt zu einer und derselben Klasse, derer nämlich, die in dem, was an sich keinen bessern Menschen ausmacht (im Glauben gewisser statutarischer Sätze, oder Begehen gewisser willkürlicher Observanzen), ihren Gottesdienst setzen. Diejenigen allein, die ihn lediglich in der Gesinnung eines guten Lebenswandels zu finden gemeint sind, unterscheiden sich von jenen durch den Ueberschritt zu einem ganz andern und über das erste weit erhabenen Prinzip.
Book IV, Part 2, Section 3
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Life , God , Faith

“Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 713, B 741
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Mathematics , Knowledge

“Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e. g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.”

Immanuel Kant

Kt6:333
Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

People , World , Justice

“Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

B xxxiv
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)