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

Explore the profound wisdom of Immanuel Kant. His timeless quotes offer insights on life, freedom, and human nature, as well as love, reason, and the beauty of small details. Let his words inspire and guide you.

Immanuel Kant was a German Enlightenment philosopher known for his influential works in various fields such as epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. He has been called the "father of modern ethics," "father of modern aesthetics," and the "father of modern philosophy." Kant argued that space and time are forms of intuition that structure all experience, but the nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable. He wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to counter skepticism and proposed that objects conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding. Kant believed reason is the source of morality, aesthetics arises from disinterested judgment, and he hoped for perpetual peace through international cooperation.

Born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1724, Kant grew up in a pietist household with a strict education focusing on religion and language rather than mathematics and science. He went on to study philosophy at the University of Königsberg under influential thinkers like Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff. After becoming a private tutor upon his father's death, he continued his research while publishing his first philosophical work in 1749. In 1781, Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, which established him as one of the most important philosophers despite its difficult reception. Throughout his life, he wrote extensively on topics such as geography, history, politics, religion, and logic. Kant passed away in 1804 leaving behind an unfinished work called Opus Postumum. His remarkable contributions to philosophy continue to be studied and appreciated worldwide today.

✵ 22. April 1724 – 12. February 1804
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Immanuel Kant Quotes

“Here as elsewhere human reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.”

Die menschliche Vernunft hat hier, wie allerwärts in ihrem reinen Gebrauche, so lange es ihr an Kritik fehlt, vorher alle mögliche unrechte Wege versucht, ehe es ihr gelingt, den einzigen wahren zu treffen.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

“It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.”

A 727, B 755
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.”

First Thesis
Variant translations:
All natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end.
All natural capacities of a creature are destined to develop themselves completely and to their purpose.
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

“The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security.”

Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Context: What is the use of working toward a lawful civic constitution among individuals, i. e., toward the creation of a commonwealth? The same unsociability which drives man to this causes any single commonwealth to stand in unrestricted freedom in relation to others; consequently, each of them must expect from another precisely the evil which oppressed the individuals and forced them to enter into a lawful civic state. The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security. Through war, through the taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even in peacetime, must suffer internally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations … from a united power acting according to decisions reached under the laws of their united will.

“When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”

Preface to 2nd edition, Tr. F. Max Müller (1905)
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“The veneration of mighty invisible beings, which was extorted from helpless man through natural fear rooted in the sense of his impotence …”

Die Verehrung mächtiger unsichtbarer Wesen, welche dem hülflosen Menschen durch die natürliche, auf dem Bewusstsein seines Unvermögens gegründete Furcht abgenöthigt wurde, …
Book IV, Part 2, Section 3
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

“Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.”

A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 1017

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.”

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785)

“I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.”

Variant translation: I freely admit: it was David Hume's remark that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my enquiries in the field of speculative philosophy.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)

“That religion in which I must know in advance that something is a divine command in order to recognize it as my duty, is the revealed religion (or the one standing in need of a revelation); in contrast, that religion in which I must first know that something is my duty before I can accept it as a divine injunction is the natural religion. … When religion is classified not with reference to its first origin and its inner possibility (here it is divided into natural and revealed religion) but with respect to its characteristics which make it capable of being shared widely with others, it can be of two kinds: either the natural religion, of which (once it has arisen) everyone can be convinced through his own reason, or a learned religion, of which one can convince others only through the agency of learning (in and through which they must be guided). … A religion, accordingly, can be natural, and at the same time revealed, when it is so constituted that men could and ought to have discovered it of themselves merely through the use of their reason, although they would not have come upon it so early, or over so wide an area, as is required. Hence a revelation thereof at a given time and in a given place might well be wise and very advantageous to the human race, in that, when once the religion thus introduced is here, and has been made known publicly, everyone can henceforth by himself and with his own reason convince himself of its truth. In this event the religion is objectively a natural religion, though subjectively one that has been revealed.”

Book IV, Part 1
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

“The body is a temple.”

A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 1043

“Newton… (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little.”

In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.
Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

“A spurious axiom of the first class is: Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime.”

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

“If it were right to overstep a little the limits of apodictic certainty befitting metaphysics, it would seem worth while to trace out some things pertaining not merely to the laws but even to the causes of sensuous intuition, which are only intellectually knowable. Of course the human mind is not affected by external things, and the world does not lie open to its insight infinitely, except as far as itself together with all other things is sustained by the same infinite power of one. Hence it does not perceive external things but by the presence of the same common sustaining cause; and hence space, which is the universal and necessary condition of the joint presence of everything known sensuously, may be called the phenomenal omnipresence, for the cause of the universe is not present to all things and everything, as being in their places, but their places, that is the relations of the substances, are possible, because it is intimately present to all. Furthermore, since the possibility of the changes and successions of all things whose principle as far as sensuously known resides in the concept of time, supposes the continuous existence of the subject whose opposite states succeed; that whose states are in flux, lasting not, however, unless sustained by another; the concept of time as one infinite and immutable in which all things are and last, is the phenomenal eternity of the general cause} But it seems more cautious to hug the shore of the cognitions granted to us by the mediocrity of our intellect than to be carried out upon the high seas of such mystic investigations, like Malebranche, whose opinion that we see all things in God is pretty nearly what has here been expounded.”

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section IV On The Principle Of The Form Of The Intelligible World

“A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things.”

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section IV On The Principle Of The Form Of The Intelligible World

“The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.”

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section III On The Principles Of The Form Of The Sensible World