Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

53. “Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.”

— Immanuel Kant

54. “Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

57. “With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.”

— Immanuel Kant

58. “Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

60. “The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.”

— Immanuel Kant

61. “Habe den Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen.”

— Immanuel Kant

62. “Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.”

— Immanuel Kant

63. “Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.”

— Immanuel Kant

64. “It is through education that all the good in the world arises.”

— Immanuel Kant

65. “Ich kann, weil ich will, was ich muss.”

— Immanuel Kant

66. “What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?”

— Immanuel Kant

67. “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.”

— Immanuel Kant

68. “Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

71. “The sum total of all possible knowledge of God is not possible for a human being, not even through a true revelation. But it is one of the worthiest inquiries to see how far our reason can go in the knowledge of God.”

— Immanuel Kant

72. “Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.”

— Immanuel Kant

73. “Animals... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.”

— Immanuel Kant

74. “Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.”

— Immanuel Kant

75. “God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

77. “All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.”

— Immanuel Kant

78. “After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.”

— Immanuel Kant

79. “Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.”

— Immanuel Kant

80. “Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.”

— Immanuel Kant

81. “Time is not an empirical concept. For neither co-existence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation a priori.”

— Immanuel Kant

82. “God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.”

— Immanuel Kant

83. “Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.”

— Immanuel Kant

84. “Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.”

— Immanuel Kant

85. “The hand is the visible part of the brain.”

— Immanuel Kant

86. “Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!”

— Immanuel Kant

87. “Maximum individuality within maximum community.”

— Immanuel Kant

88. “Maturity is having the courage to use one’s own intelligence.”

— Immanuel Kant

89. “The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.”

— Immanuel Kant

90. “A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

92. “Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.”

— Immanuel Kant

93. “In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.”

— Immanuel Kant

94. “Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.”

— Immanuel Kant

95. “Human reason is by nature architectonic.”

— Immanuel Kant

96. “Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.”

— Immanuel Kant

97. “Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done.”

— Immanuel Kant

98. “Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

100. “The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.”

— Immanuel Kant