Emmanuel Kant citations (212 citations, Page 5)

Emmanuel Kant: 212 citations 2 J'aime

Emmanuel Kant citations célèbres

“Lhomme acquiert la femme, le couple acquiert des enfants et la famille des domestiques.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Métaphysique des mœurs

Métaphysique des mœurs, 1797, Doctrine du droit

“Toute intuition sans concept n'aboutit pas
Tout concept sans intuition est vide”

Emmanuel Kant

“Agis selon des maximes qui puissent en même temps se prendre elles-mêmes pour objet comme lois universelles de la nature.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs

Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs, 1785, Troisième section
Variante: Agis selon la maxime qui peut en même temps se transformer en loi universelle.

“…il n'est besoin ni de science ni de philosophie pour savoir ce qu’on a à faire, pour être honnête et bon, même sage et vertueux.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs

Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs, 1785, Première section

“Un gouvernement qui serait fondé sur le principe de la bienveillance envers le peuple, tel celui du père envers ses enfants, c’est-à-dire un gouvernement paternel, où par conséquent les sujets tels des enfants mineurs, incapables de décider de ce qui leur est vraiment utile ou nuisible, sont obligés de se comporter d’une manière purement passive, afin d’attendre uniquement du jugement du chef de l’État la façon dont ils doivent être heureux, et uniquement de sa bonté qu’il le veuille également -un tel gouvernement, dis-je, est le plus grand despotisme que l’on puisse concevoir.”

Emmanuel Kant

Théorie et pratique - D'un prétendu droit de mentir par humanité, 1797

“Penser par soi-même.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Critique de la faculté de juger

Critique de la faculté de juger, 1790

Emmanuel Kant Citations

“Les esprits qui ont le sentiment du sublime sont entraînés insensiblement vers les sentiments élevés de l’amitié, du mépris du monde, de l’éternité, par le calme et le silence d’une soirée d’été, alors que la lumière tremblante des étoiles perce les ombres de la nuit, et que la lune solitaire paraît à l’horizon. Le jour brillant inspire l’ardeur du travail et le sentiment de la joie. Le sublime émeut, le beau charme.”

Emmanuel Kant

The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

Joie

“Une politique valable ne peut faire un pas sans rendre hommage à la morale.”

Emmanuel Kant

“Une beauté naturelle est une belle chose; la beauté artistique est une belle représentation d’une chose.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Critique de la faculté de juger

Critique de la faculté de juger, 1790

beauté

“Agis de façon telle que tu traites l'humanité, aussi bien dans ta personne que dans tout autre, toujours en même temps comme fin, et jamais simplement comme moyen.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs

Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs, 1785, Deuxième section

temps , personnes

“De tout ce qu'il est possible de concevoir dans le monde, et même en général hors du monde, il n’est rien qui puisse sans restriction être tenu pour bon, si ce n'est seulement une BONNE VOLONTÉ.”

Emmanuel Kant livre Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs

Fondation de la métaphysique des mœurs, 1785, Première section

volonté , monde

“Ce dernier talent correspond proprement à ce qu’on appelle l’âme; car exprimer et rendre universellement communicable ce qu’il y a d’indicible dans l’état d’esprit associé à une certaine représentation – et ce, que l’expression relève du langage, de la peinture ou de la plastique -, cela requiert un pouvoir d’appréhender le jeu si fugace de l’imagination et de le synthétiser dans un concept qui se peut communiquer sans la contrainte de règles (un concept qui, précisément pour cette raison, est original et fait apparaître en même temps une règle nouvelle qui n’a pu résulter d’aucun principe ou d’aucun exemple qui l’eusse précédée).”

Emmanuel Kant

La Critique de la faculté de juger (Critique du jugement esthétique): Une oeuvre fondamentale de l'esthétique moderne

Emmanuel Kant: Citations en anglais

“When the man governed by self-interest, the god of this world, does not renounce it but merely refines it by the use of reason and extends it beyond the constricting boundary of the present, he is represented (Luke XVI, 3-9) as one who, in his very person [as servant], defrauds his master [self- interest] and wins from him sacrifices in behalf of “duty.””

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Immanuel Kant

Book IV, Part 1, Section 2, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

“The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire "beautiful sex," should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous.
After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.”

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Immanuel Kant

What is Enlightenment? (1784)

“All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.”

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Immanuel Kant

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

“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.”

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Immanuel Kant

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)

“I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

B 158
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“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.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

A xix
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

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

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

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

“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?”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

B 832-833
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.”

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Immanuel Kant

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

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

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Immanuel Kant

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.”

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Immanuel Kant

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

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

Preface, A vii
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.”

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Immanuel Kant

Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 52
The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

“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.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

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

“The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Practical Reason

Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

“Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval;”

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Immanuel Kant

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

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Immanuel Kant

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)

“The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequendy transferred to man.”

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Immanuel Kant

Part II, pp. 212-213
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

“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.”

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Immanuel Kant

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
(1786)

“All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.”

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Immanuel Kant

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883)
(1786)

“The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.”

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Immanuel Kant

Eternal Peace (1795)

“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.”

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Immanuel Kant

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

“Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.”

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Immanuel Kant

Part II, p. 146
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

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

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Immanuel Kant

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785)

“Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

A 120
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“Men will not understand … that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise.”

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Immanuel Kant

As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 207

“Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.”

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Immanuel Kant

Part Two : Metaphysical Principles of Virtue
Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

“This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Critique of Pure Reason

A 627, B 655 (Physico-Theological Proof Impossible)
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“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.”

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Immanuel Kant livre Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

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)