Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.”

— Immanuel Kant

152. “Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.”

— Immanuel Kant

153. “Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. – ’Metaphysical Principles of Virtue.”

— Immanuel Kant

154. “Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

161. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

170. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

174. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

182. “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

183. “Coffee! Coffee!”

— Immanuel Kant

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

195. “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

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. “Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.”

— Immanuel Kant

198. “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

199. “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

200. “Under a nonrepublican constitution, where subjects are not citizens, the easiest thing in the world to do is to declare war. Here the ruler is not a fellow citizen, but the nation’s owner, and war does not affect his table, his hunt, his places of pleasure, his court festivals, and so on. Thus, he can decide to go to war for the most meaningless of reasons, as if it were a kind of pleasure party...”

— Immanuel Kant