507 Quotes by Immanuel Kant

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath.

Was nicht ein Gegenstand der Erfahrung sein kann, dessen Erkenntniß wäre hyperphysisch, und mit dergleichen haben wir hier gar nicht zu thun, sondern mit der Naturerkenntniß, deren Realität durch Erfahrung bestätigt werden kann, on sie gleich a priori möglich ist und vor aller Erfahrung hervorgeht.

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.

Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.

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

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.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly in all matters.

...[F]reedom... is a property of all rational beings.

...[W]e must admit that... law must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity...