Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

153. “Honesty is better than any policy.”

— Immanuel Kant

154. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

156. “It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.”

— Immanuel Kant

157. “The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause.”

— Immanuel Kant

158. “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

159. “The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.”

— Immanuel Kant

160. “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.”

— Immanuel Kant

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

165. “Coffee! Coffee!”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

167. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”

— Immanuel Kant

173. “The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

174. “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

175. “But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

179. “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

180. “The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

188. “You must, therefore you can. A free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same thing.”

— Immanuel Kant

189. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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