Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.”

— Immanuel Kant

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

210. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

218. “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

219. “The main point of enlightenment is man’s release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.”

— Immanuel Kant

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

225. “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

226. “In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

229. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

Featured in: Self-Improvement Quotes

231. “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

232. “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

Featured in: Being Happy Quotes

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

— Immanuel Kant

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

Featured in: Real Quotes

239. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Immanuel Kant

250. “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