"Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends."
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Immanuel Kant quotes (page 9 of 16)
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future."
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"To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized - perhaps too much for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality - for that, much is lacking."
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"Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal."
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"Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!"
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"...as soon as we examine suicide from the standpoint of religion we immediately see it in its true light. We have been placed in this world under certain conditions and for specific purposes. But a suicide opposes the purpose of his creator; he arrives in the other world as one who has deserted his post; he must be looked upon as a rebel against God. God is our owner; we are his property; his providence works for our good."
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"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
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"There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva)."
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"But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination."
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"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?"
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"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."
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"Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties."
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"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."
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"It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless."
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"There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself."
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"Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made."
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"Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter."
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"Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness."
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"Freedom can never be comprehended, nor even can insight into it be gained."
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"Beneficence is a duty."
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