Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.”

— Immanuel Kant

203. “There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise.”

— Immanuel Kant

204. “Every human being should always be treated as an end and never as a mere instrument.”

— Immanuel Kant

205. “True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict.”

— Immanuel Kant

206. “It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him.”

— Immanuel Kant

207. “No state at war with another state should engage in hostilities of such a kind as to render mutual confidence impossible when peace will have been made.”

— Immanuel Kant

208. “Experience may teach us what is, but never that it cannot be otherwise.”

— Immanuel Kant

209. “The greatest evil that can oppress civilized peoples derives from wars, not, indeed, so much from actual present or past wars, as from the never-ending and constantly increasing arming for future war.”

— Immanuel Kant

210. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

212. “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

213. “Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”

— Immanuel Kant

214. “Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.”

— Immanuel Kant

215. “It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.”

— Immanuel Kant

216. “The true religion is to be posited not in the knowledge or confession of what God allegedly does or has done for our salvation, but in what we must do to become worthy of this.”

— Immanuel Kant

217. “For how is it possible, says that acute man, that when a concept is given me, I can go beyond it and connect with it another which is not contained in it, in such a manner as if that latter necessarily belonged to the former?”

— Immanuel Kant

218. “No one may force anyone to be happy according to his manner of imagining the well-being of other men; instead, everyone may seek his happiness in the way that seems good to him as long as he does not infringe on the freedom of others to pursue a similar purpose, when such freedom may coexist with the freedom of every other man according to a possible and general law.”

— Immanuel Kant

219. “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.”

— Immanuel Kant

220. “If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.”

— Immanuel Kant

221. “The outcome of an act commonly influences our judgment about its rightness, even though the former was uncertain, while the latter is certain.”

— Immanuel Kant

222. “From the crooked timber of humanity, never was a straight thing made.”

— Immanuel Kant

223. “If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.”

— Immanuel Kant

224. “It is not without cause that men feel the burden of their existence, though they are themselves the cause of those burdens.”

— Immanuel Kant

225. “I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.”

— Immanuel Kant

226. “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

227. “What are the aims which are at the same time duties? They are perfecting of ourselves, the happiness of others.”

— Immanuel Kant

228. “If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.”

— Immanuel Kant

229. “We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.”

— Immanuel Kant

230. “Woman wants control, man self-control .”

— Immanuel Kant

231. “Even a man’s exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.”

— Immanuel Kant

232. “The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

234. “The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.”

— Immanuel Kant

235. “By a lie a man throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity as a man.”

— Immanuel Kant

236. “All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

238. “Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must always be regarded at the same time as an end.”

— Immanuel Kant

239. “Ich solle niemals anders verfahren, als so, dass ich auch wollen k o« nne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden. I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”

— Immanuel Kant

240. “He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray.”

— Immanuel Kant

241. “It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err – not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.”

— Immanuel Kant

242. “When the tremulous radiance of a summer night fills with twinkling stars and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn into a state of enhanced sensitivity made of friendship and disdain for the world and eternity.”

— Immanuel Kant

243. “That Logic has advanced in this sure course, even from the earliest times, is apparent from the fact that, since Aristotle, it has been unable to advance a step, and thus to all appearance has reached its completion.”

— Immanuel Kant

244. “Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.”

— Immanuel Kant

245. “The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

246. “The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.”

— Immanuel Kant

247. “War itself requires no particular motivation, but appears to be ingrained in human nature and is even valued as something noble; indeed, the desire for glory inspires men to it, even independently of selfish motives.”

— Immanuel Kant

248. “The great mass of people are worthy of our respect.”

— Immanuel Kant

249. “Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?”

— Immanuel Kant

250. “The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.”

— Immanuel Kant