Top 35 Immanuel Kant Quotes

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th century. His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason.Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Konigsberg, Prussia, or what is now Kaliningrad, Russia. While tutoring, he published science papers, including "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" in 1755. He spent the next 15 years as a metaphysics lecturer. In 1781, he published the first part of Critique of Pure Reason. He published more critiques in the years preceding his death on February 12, 1804, in the city of his birth.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

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

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.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.

One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.

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.

An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.

I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her percepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life.

Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.

Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

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.

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own 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 own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know!

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

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.

If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.