Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

153. “If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth.”

— Immanuel Kant

154. “The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.”

— Immanuel Kant

155. “Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.”

— Immanuel Kant

156. “Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.”

— Immanuel Kant

157. “Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.”

— Immanuel Kant

158. “If we could see ourselves... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.”

— Immanuel Kant

159. “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.”

— Immanuel Kant

160. “If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.”

— Immanuel Kant

161. “Every beginning is in time, and every limit of extension in space. Space and time, however, exist in the world of sense only. Hence phenomena are only limited in the world conditionally, the world itself, however, is limited neither conditionally nor unconditionally.”

— Immanuel Kant

162. “Since the human race’s natural end is to make steady cultural progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progressing toward the better. And this progress may well be occasionally interrupted, but it will never be broken off.”

— Immanuel Kant

163. “The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

165. “An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.”

— Immanuel Kant

166. “Riches ennoble a man’s circumstances, but not himself.”

— Immanuel Kant

167. “I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

— Immanuel Kant

168. “The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

170. “But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.”

— Immanuel Kant

171. “By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.”

— Immanuel Kant

172. “The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend – and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.”

— Immanuel Kant

173. “Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings.”

— Immanuel Kant

174. “The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.”

— Immanuel Kant

175. “The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

176. “Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

177. “Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.”

— Immanuel Kant

178. “Act in such a way that you will be worthy of being happy.”

— Immanuel Kant

179. “It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.”

— Immanuel Kant

180. “When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any.”

— Immanuel Kant

181. “Coffee! Coffee!”

— Immanuel Kant

182. “The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.”

— Immanuel Kant

183. “Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‘War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.’”

— Immanuel Kant

184. “Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.”

— Immanuel Kant

185. “Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.”

— Immanuel Kant

186. “There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.”

— Immanuel Kant

187. “All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.”

— Immanuel Kant

188. “In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.”

— Immanuel Kant

189. “Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one’s means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.”

— Immanuel Kant

190. “All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.”

— Immanuel Kant

191. “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.”

— Immanuel Kant

192. “We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.”

— Immanuel Kant

193. “But freedom is a mere Idea, the objective reality of which can in no wise be shown according to the laws of nature, and consequently not in any possible experience; and for this reason it can never be comprehended or understood, because we cannot support it by any sort of example or analogy.”

— Immanuel Kant

194. “All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.”

— Immanuel Kant

195. “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will.”

— Immanuel Kant

196. “Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.”

— Immanuel Kant

197. “All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

199. “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.”

— Immanuel Kant

200. “Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.”

— Immanuel Kant