Quotes About Philosophy

We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.

Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected...

by saying that the former was only concerned with quality, the latter only with quantity, mistook cause for effect.

Phantasie ist unser guter Genius oder unser Dämon.

Thinking is conversation with oneself.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

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

Human reason goes forth inexorably to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason or principles based on it.

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

the cultivation of reason leads humanity sooner to misery than happiness

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.

Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor

Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must always be regarded at the same time as an end.

in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.

Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts.

Immanuel Kant

Handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am but only as I appear to myself. The consciousness of oneself is therefore very far from being a knowledge of oneself.

Immanuel Kant

For if phenomena are things by themselves, freedom cannot be saved. Nature in that case is the complete and sufficient cause determining every event, and its condition is always contained in that series of phenomena only which, together with their effect, are necessary under the law of nature.

A great part, perhaps the greatest part, of the business of our reason consists in the analysation of the conceptions which we already possess of objects.

From such crooked timber as humanity is made of, no straight thing was ever constructed.

For if we regard space and time as properties that must, as regards their possibility, be found in things in themselves, [...] then we really cannot blame the good Bishop Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion. Nay, even our own existence, which would thus be made dependent on the self-subsistent reality of a non-entity such as time, would, along with this time, be changed into mere illusion - an absurdity of which hitherto no one has been guilty.