Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Philosopher

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher known for his work in ethics and epistemology, particularly through his influential text 'Critique of Pure Reason.'

Men Law Science Mean Thinking Philosophical
Born
April 22, 1724
Died
February 12, 1804
Quotes
319
Rank
#115

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Immanuel Kant quotes (page 13 of 16)

319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty."

Grief Fate Psychology
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"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."

Being Happy Men Enjoy Life
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"We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism."

Knowledge Common Sense Principles
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"Manners or etiquette ('accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior') call for no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues. Even though manners are no virtues, they are a means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crude elements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and the more capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles."

Determination Communication Mean
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"In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together."

Men Together Natural
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"It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him."

Immaturity Individual Natural
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"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?"

Order Miserable Hell
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"Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable."

Death Suicide Suicidal
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"Men will not understand ... that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise."

Men Long Action
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"Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason."

Fate Peculiar Answers
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"Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts)."

Spring Knowledge Science
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"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."

Yield Intuition Elements
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"There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish."

Waste Penance Fasting
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"Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose. To this single idea must the revolution be ascribed, by which, after groping in the dark for so many centuries, natural science was at length conducted into the path of certain progress."

Nature Character Dark
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"We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action."

Spring Secret Examination
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"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity...No thing is required for this enlightenment.. .except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters."

Men Self Immaturity
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"Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature."

Nature Powerful Creating
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"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.'"

Peace War Evil
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"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."

Flower Science Doe
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"Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence."

Rights Giving Secret
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