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(no category)
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There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
-Immanuel Kant
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Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
-Immanuel Kant
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Action(s)
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Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law.
-Immanuel Kant
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Advice
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So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
-Immanuel Kant
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Choice
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Suppose some one asserts of his lustful appetite that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible. Ask him if a gallows were erected before the house where he finds this opportunity, in order that he should be hanged thereon immediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not then control his passion; we need not be long in doubt what he would reply. Ask him, however, if his sovereign ordered him, on the pain of the same immediate execution, to bear false witness against an honourable man, whom the prince might wish to destroy under a plausible pretext, would he consider it possible in that case to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to affirm whether he would do so or not, but he would unhesitatingly admit that it is possible to do so. He judges, therefore, that he can do a certain thing because he is conscious that he ought, and he recognizes that he is free--a fact which but for the moral law he would never have known.
-Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (p. 118-19), 1963
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Conscience
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Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.
-Immanuel Kant
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Criticism
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Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.
-Immanuel Kant
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Deception/Lying
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By a lie, a man...annihilates his dignity as a man.
-Immanuel Kant
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Enlightenment, The
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Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
-Immanuel Kant
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Gossip
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-Immanuel Kant
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Happiness
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It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy
-Immanuel Kant
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Honesty
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From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
-Immanuel Kant
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Hope
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What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
-Immanuel Kant
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Humanity
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Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.
-Immanuel Kant
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Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.
-Immanuel Kant, from From Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht
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Instinct
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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.
-Immanuel Kant
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Life
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Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
-Immanuel Kant
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Mankind, Man
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The 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 Kant
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Morals
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Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
-Immanuel Kant
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Philosophy
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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?
-Immanuel Kant
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Reason
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All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
-Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781
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Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
-Immanuel Kant
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Recognition
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Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
-Immanuel Kant
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Reflection
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Two things fill the heart 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.
-Immanuel Kant
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Suicide
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Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
-Immanuel Kant
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Books by and about Immanuel Kant