Quotes from Immanuel Kant

Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.

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

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.

Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.

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

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.

Beneficence is a duty; and he who frequently practices it, and sees his benevolent intentions realized comes, at length, really to love him to whom he has done good.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

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.

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

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.

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

Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed.

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

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.