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 KantTwo 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.
Immanuel KantBut 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.
Immanuel KantGod 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.
Immanuel KantThe arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
Immanuel KantMarriage...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.
Immanuel KantA society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.
Immanuel KantTHERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.
Immanuel KantReason 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.
Immanuel KantGenius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
Immanuel KantCriticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.
Immanuel KantFor peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
Immanuel KantIn all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
Immanuel KantThe history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.
Immanuel KantThe greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
Immanuel KantAn organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
Immanuel KantWe 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 KantFor 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 KantThe 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 KantThe 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 KantThe only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.
Immanuel Kantcruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened.
Immanuel KantPhilosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.
Immanuel KantOur 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).
Immanuel KantEnlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.
Immanuel KantTwo things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
Immanuel Kant. . . as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe that feeling will help them out, even in what concerns general laws: and besides, feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil, nor has any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings. . . .
Immanuel KantIt 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 KantWithout 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.
Immanuel KantEven philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
Immanuel Kant