Quotes from Immanuel Kant

How things may be in themselves, without regard to the representations through which they affect us, is utterly beyond the sphere of our cognition.

What would proceed from a continual promotion of living force, which does not let itself climb above a certain grade, other than a rapid death from delight?

Denken zonder ervaring is leeg, maar ervaring zonder denken is blind.

The outcome of an act commonly influences our judgment about its rightness, even though the former was uncertain, while the latter is certain.

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.

and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy; while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

I do not say that things in themselves possess a quantity, that their reality possesses a degree, their existence a connection of accidents in a substance, etc. This nobody can prove, because such a synthetic connection from mere concepts, without any reference to sensuous intuition on the one side or connection of such intuition in a possible experience on the other, is absolutely impossible.

Second among the crimina carnis contra naturam is intercourse sexus homogenii/ where the object of sexual inclination continues, indeed, to be human, but is changed since the sexual congress is not heterogeneous but homogeneous, i.e., when a woman satisfies her impulse on a woman, or a man on a man.

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. ? Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

All crimina carnis contra naturam debase the human condition below that of the animal, and make man unworthy of his humanity; he then no longer deserves to be a person, and such conduct is the most ignoble and degraded that a man can engage in, with regard to the duties he has towards himself. Suicide is certainly the most dreadful thing that a man can do to himself, but is not so base and ignoble as these crimina carnis contra naturam which are the most contemptible acts a man can commit.

To think an object, then, is not the same as to know an object.

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own.

A Critique of pure Reason, i.e. of our faculty of judging a priori according to principles, would be incomplete, if the Judgement, which as a cognitive faculty also makes claim to such principles, were not treated as a particular part of it; although its principles in a system of pure Philosophy need form no particular part between the theoretical and the practical, but can be annexed when needful to one or both as occasion requires.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge. Today, however, he who lives in conformity with what he teaches is taken for a dreamer.

Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War";

probability is a truth, known however through insufficient grounds, the knowledge of which is therefore deficient, but not deceptive [...]

It would be impossible to represent to ourselves darkness, unless light had been given to the senses.

no one can be compelled by law to be beneficent (though he may be taxed and this money then distributed in welfare payments)

The sight of a being who is not graced by any touch of a pure and good will but who yet enjoys an uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator. Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of being even worthy of happiness.

The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men.

Wir erkennen von den Dingen a priori nur das, was wir selbst in sie hineingelegt haben.

If God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking.