69 Quotes About Kant

Against Hume, Kant has found a more proper ground for humility: “True humility follows unavoidably from our sincere and exact comparison of ourselves with the moral law” . The proper way to come to terms with our limits is not to compare ourselves with others but to hold ourselves accountable to those rational moral standards we know to be most properly our own.

Chisels and hammers may suffice to work a piece of wood, but for etching we require an etcher's needle. Thus common sense and speculative understanding are both useful, but each in its own way: the former in judgments which apply immediately to experience; the latter when we judge universally from mere concepts, as in metaphysics, where sound common sense, so called in spite of the inappropriateness of the word, has no right to judge at all.

The world of sense, if it is limited, lies necessarily within the infinite void. If we ignore this, and with it, space in general, as an a priori condition of the possibility of phenomena, the whole world of sense vanishes, which alone forms the object of our enquiry.

Given all the forces arrayed against it, no wonder Kant thought growing up to be more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned — principally through the experience of watching others use it well —but it cannot be taught.

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

In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone he goes so far as to claim that conscientious moral judgement cannot err. The voice of conscience, which is our internal moral judge, can serve as a ‘guiding thread’ (Leitfaden) in matters of doubt.

Kant finds that the ‘virtue of the heart’ is central and emphasizes the role of the understanding and concepts at the expense of inclinations and feelings, Gellert argues that the understanding and feeling coincide with one another. It is our task to cultivate our feelings so that they become true moral feelings.

the passage on dignity is an addendum to the formula of autonomy: ‘act only so that the will could regard itself as at the same time giving universal law through its maxim’ (G IV 434). Kant raises the question of why a morally good being abides by this formula. His answer (in brief) is because morality has an elevated worth (i.e. only moral dictates are categorical).

Gustav Mahler always carried Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre with him on concert tours, for instance, and read aloud from the Critique of Pure Reason to Alma when she was in labour.