Immanuel Kant: Greatest Quotes

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

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

Seek not the favour 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.

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another.

Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

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

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

The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations.

Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they on they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.

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

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.

If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

It was the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.

For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

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

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

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

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.