Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.”

— Immanuel Kant

252. “Two things fill the mind with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.”

— Immanuel Kant

253. “Hence we may at once dismiss as easily foreseen but futile objection, “that by our admitting the ideality of space and of time the whole sensible world would be turned into mere illusion.”

— Immanuel Kant

254. “A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

256. “What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example... even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.”

— Immanuel Kant

257. “All so-called moral interest consists simply in respect for the law.”

— Immanuel Kant

258. “For now we see that when we conceive ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it, and recognise the autonomy of the will with its consequence, morality; whereas, if we conceive ourselves as under obligation we consider ourselves as belonging to the world of sense, and at the same time to the world of understanding.”

— Immanuel Kant

259. “The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.”

— Immanuel Kant

260. “Innocence is indeed a glorious thing, only, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself, and is easily seduced.”

— Immanuel Kant

261. “Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

262. “If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all.”

— Immanuel Kant

263. “If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on... then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.”

— Immanuel Kant

264. “To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath.”

— Immanuel Kant

265. “Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.”

— Immanuel Kant

266. “Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?”

— Immanuel Kant

267. “He who would know the world must first manufacture it.”

— Immanuel Kant

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

— Immanuel Kant

269. “I assert that, in any particular natural science, one encounters genuine scientific substance only to the extent that mathematics is present.”

— Immanuel Kant

270. “Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only ‘Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?’ Where you cannot it is to be rejected...”

— Immanuel Kant

271. “The greatest and perhaps only utility of all philosophy of pure reason is thus only negative, namely that it does not serve for expansion, as an organon, but rather, as a discipline, serves for the determination of boundaries, and instead of discovering truth it has only the silent merit of guarding against errors.”

— Immanuel Kant

272. “It is certainly a bad sign of common sense to appeal to it as a witness.”

— Immanuel Kant

273. “I have no knowledge of myself as I am but only as I appear to myself. The consciousness of oneself is therefore very far from being a knowledge of oneself.”

— Immanuel Kant

274. “It is of great consequence to have previously determined the concept that one wants to elucidate through observation before questioning experience about it; for one finds in experience what one needs only if one knows in advance what to look for.”

— Immanuel Kant

275. “Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor.”

— Immanuel Kant

276. “It is different with the transcendental division of a phenomenon. How far that may extend is not a matter of experience, but a principle of reason, which never allows us to consider the empirical regressus in the decomposition of extended bodies, according to the nature of these phenomena, as at any time absolutely completed.”

— Immanuel Kant

277. “For if phenomena are things by themselves, freedom cannot be saved. Nature in that case is the complete and sufficient cause determining every event, and its condition is always contained in that series of phenomena only which, together with their effect, are necessary under the law of nature.”

— Immanuel Kant

278. “Only by what a man does heedless of enjoyment, in complete freedom and independently of what he can produce passively from the hand of nature, does he give absolute worth to his existence, as the real existence of a person. Happiness, with all its plethora of pleasures, is far from being an unconditioned good.”

— Immanuel Kant

279. “How things may be in themselves, without regard to the representations through which they affect us, is utterly beyond the sphere of our cognition.”

— Immanuel Kant

280. “We must not, however, begin with theology. The religion which is founded merely on theology can never contain anything of morality. Hence we derive no other feelings from it but fear on the one hand, and hope of reward on the other, and this produces merely a superstitious cult. Morality, then, must come first and theology follow; and that is religion.”

— Immanuel Kant

281. “The spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit dominates every people.”

— Immanuel Kant

282. “The march of mathematics is pursued on a broad and magnificent highway, which the latest posterity shall frequent without fear of danger or impediment.”

— Immanuel Kant

283. “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance, nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians...”

— Immanuel Kant

284. “A great part, perhaps the greatest part, of the business of our reason consists in the analysation of the conceptions which we already possess of objects.”

— Immanuel Kant

285. “Thinking is conversation with oneself.”

— Immanuel Kant

286. “There are such manifold forms of nature; there are many modifications of the general transcendental concepts of nature that are left undetermined by the laws furnished by pure intellect a priori because these laws only concern the general possibility of nature as an object of the senses.”

— Immanuel Kant

287. “What would proceed from a continual promotion of living force, which does not let itself climb above a certain grade, other than a rapid death from delight?”

— Immanuel Kant

288. “An appeal to the consent of the common sense of mankind cannot be allowed, for that is a witness whose authority depends merely upon rumor. Says Horace: Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi.”

— Immanuel Kant

289. “Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason.”

— Immanuel Kant

290. “To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.”

— Immanuel Kant

291. “Thus there is an analogy between the juridical relation of human actions and the mechanical relation of moving forces. I never can do anything to another man without giving him a right to do the same to me on the same conditions; just as no body can act with its moving force on another body without thereby causing the other to react equally against it.”

— Immanuel Kant