Immanuel Kant Quotes

The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.

The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

Contra esa negligencia o banal modo de pensar que rebusca el principio entre motivaciones y leyes empíricas tampoco cabe promulgar con excesiva frecuencia demasiadas advertencias, porque, para no extenuarse, a la razón humana le gusta reposar sobre tal almohada y, al soñar con simulaciones más melifluas (que sin embargo le hacen estrechar entre sus brazos una nube en vez de abrazar a Juno), suplanta a la moralidad por un híbrido cuyo bastardo parentesco es de muy distinto linaje y que se parece a cuanto uno quiera ver en él, si bien jamás le confundirá con la virtud aquel que haya contemplado una sola vez su verdadero semblante.

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!

For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

We have seen, therefore, that I am not allowed even to *assume*, for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason *God, freedom, immortality*, unless at the same time *I deprive* speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insights. Reason, namely, in order to arrive at these, must employ principles which extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if in spite of this they are applied also to what cannot be an object of experience, actually always change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical *expansion* of pure reason impossible. Hence I had to suspend *knowledge* in order to make room for *belief*. For the dogmatism of metaphysics without a preceding critique of pure reason, is the source of all that disbelief which opposes morality and which is always very dogmatic.

never wish to see a just cause defended with unjust means

The veneration of mighty invisible beings, which was extorted from helpless man through natural fear rooted in the sense of his impotence …

The world will by no means perish by a diminution in the number of evil men.

The force of the word World, as commonly used, of itself falls in with us. For no one will attribute accidents to the World as parts, but as determinations, states; hence the so-called world of the ego, unrestrained by the single substance and its accidents, is not very appositely called a World, unless, perhaps, an imaginary one.

Cuanto más viene a ocuparse una razón cultivada del propósito relativo al disfrute de la vida y la felicidad, tanto más alejado queda el hombre de la verdadera satisfacción.

"Know your heart - whether it is good or evil, whether the source of your actions is pure or impure. Know what can be imputed to you and what belongs to your moral state, whether as something inherent in man's substance or as something derived (acquired or admitted).
Moral self-knowledge, which requires one to penetrate into the unfathomable depths and abyss of one's heart, is the beginning of all human wisdom. For wisdom consists in the harmony of the will of a being with his final end, and in the case of man this requires him first to remove the inner obstacle (an evil will actually present in him) and then to develop his inalienable and inherent disposition of a good will. "Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to deification.

By a lie a man throws away, and as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.

A public can only arrive at enlightenment slowly. Through revolution, the abandonment of personal despotism may be engendered and the end of profit-seeking and domineering oppression may occur, but never a true reform of the state of mind. Instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones, will serve as the guiding reins of the great, unthinking mass. All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters. But I hear people clamor on all sides: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, drill! The tax collector: Don't argue, pay! The pastor: Don't argue, believe!

...Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.