Immanuel Kant Quotes - Page 5

Beneficence is a duty.

The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.

Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

There is nothing higher than reason.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

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.

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.

Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.

Marriage...is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.

There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

So act that anything you do may become universal law.

The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman ; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires.

Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representations of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish glow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind.

It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law ? i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

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.

God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.

The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.