Immanuel Kant Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

2. If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

3. Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

4. Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.

5. ...When he puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were the property of things. Critique of Judgment

6. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

7. An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner.The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

8. But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

9. I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. Critique of Pure Reason

10. In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

11. Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness. The Metaphysics of Morals

12. Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

13. Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.

14. Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed. Critique of Pure Reason

15. That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how should the faculty of knowledge be called into activity, if not by objects which affect our senses and which, on the one hand, produce representations by themselves or on the other, rouse the activity of our understanding to compare, connect, or separate them and thus to convert the raw material of our sensible impressions into knowledge of objects, which we call experience? With respect to time, therefore, no knowledge within us is antecedent to experience, but all knowledge begins with it.But though all our knowledge begins with experience, is does not follow that it all arises from experience. For it is quite possible that even our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we perceive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty of knowledge (incited by sense impressions) supplies from itself, a supplement which we do not distinguish from that raw material until long practice and rendered us capable of separating one from the other.It is therefore a question which deserves at least closer investigation and cannot be disposed of at first sight: Whether there is any knowledge independent of all experience and even of all impressions of the senses? Such knowledge is called 'a priori' and is distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its source 'a posteriori', that is, in experience... Critique of Pure Reason

16. The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason

17. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. Critique of Pure Reason

18. To be is to do.

19. Two 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. Critique of Practical Reason

20. Without 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. Perpetual Peace