Kant Quotes

“Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything.

There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy

“With Kant, we could say that telltales act in accordance with the categorical imperative, fulfilling a moral duty. They choose to expose the truth for the sake of a higher ethical principle, even if it comes at great personal cost. ("Alert. High noon.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind. Losing all their independence as divine works, things gravitate henceforth round human thought, whence their laws are derived. What wonder, after that, is if criticism had resulted in the virtual disappearance of all metaphysics? [...] As soon as the universe is reduced to the laws of mind, man, now become creator, has no longer any means of rising above himself. Legislator of a world to which his own mind has given birth, he is henceforth the prisoner of his own work, and he will never escape from it anymore. [...] if my thought is the condition of being, never by thought shall I be able to transcend the limits of my being and my capacity for the infinite will never be satisfied.”
― Étienne Gilson

“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”
― Immanuel Kant

“...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.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

“To question reason is to trust it.”
― Mitch Stokes

“There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum

“What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?”
― Immanuel Kant

“Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement.

"The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony"; and this dull content is unworthy of man.

History is made only in those periods in which the contradictions of reality are being resolved by growth, as the hesitations of and awkwardness of youth pass into the ease and order of maturity.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Even if we restrict ourselves to the comparatively limited conceptual repertoire for talking about such matters that early Wittgenstein makes available, we may already say this: in order to learn a first language, the potential speaker needs not only to learn to see the symbol in the sign, she needs the very idea of language to become actual in her. This formal aspect of what it is to be human—the linguistic capacity as such—is something that dawns with the learning of one’s first language, with one’s becoming the bearer of a linguistic practice. We touched above, in the reply to Sullivan, on how the Tractatus inherits and adapts yet a further feature of the Kantian enterprise of critique: it starts with the assumption not only that we already have the very faculty we seek to elucidate in philosophy, but also that the prosecution of the philosophical inquiry must everywhere involve the exercise of the very capacity it seeks to elucidate. The Tractatus does not seek to confer the power of language on us: we already have this and bring it to our encounter with the book. Hence, it does not seek to explain what language is (as it is sometimes put) from sideways-on—from a position outside language—but rather from the self-conscious perspective of someone who already, in seeking philosophical clarity about what language is, seeks clarity about herself qua linguistic being. Through its exercise, however, the book does seek to confer a heightened mastery of that capacity on us—a reflective self- understanding of its logic and its limits, and of the philosophical confusions that arise from misunderstandings thereof. This heightened mastery (like the general power itself) can be acquired only through forms of further exercise of that same capacity. What I just said about the Tractatus, at this level of methodological abstraction, is no less true of the method of the Philosophical Investigations. The author of the Tractatus, however, unlike later Wittgenstein, never pauses for even a moment to reflect upon what it means to learn to recognize the symbol in the sign through attending to contexts of significant use. Nevertheless, early Witt- genstein would certainly agree with his later self on this point: for the learner of language, light must gradually dawn over the whole—over sign and symbol together.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“O ser humano é aquilo que a educação faz dele.”
― Immanuel Kant

“The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and it consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence evokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality. Accordingly the beautiful seems to be regarded as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding , the sublime as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason, Hence, the delight is in the former case coupled with the representation of quality, but in this case with that of quantity. Moreover, the former delight is very different from the latter in kind. For the beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life, and thus is compatible with charms and a playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arrises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check of the vital forces followed all at once by discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no play, but a serious matter of the imagination. Hence charms are also incompatible with it; and, since the mind is not simply attracted by the object, but is also alternately repelled thereby, the delight in the sublime does not show how much involve positive pleasure as admiration or respect, i.e. merits the name of a negative pleasure.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

“Since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason but on the practical reason of the moral sense, it follows that any Bible or revelation must be judged by its value for morality, and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code.

Churches and dogmas have value only in so far as they assist the moral development of the race.

When mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared.

The real church is a community of people, however scattered and divided, who are united by devotion to the common moral law. It was to establish such a community that Christ lived and died.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“On the Kantian conception logic as a whole is concerned with investigating the form of the understanding: that is, the form of the intellectual aspect of our overall cognitive faculty to represent objects. Pure general and transcendental logic, in turn, are each concerned with investigating a dimension of that form. On this conception, the source of logical form is not to be comprehended apart from the role of our capacity for thought in the achievement of forms of cognition that are not merely logical. And the source of the notion of mere form of which pure general logic treats is not to be comprehended apart from its internal relation to the full-blooded form of that unified general cognitive capacity - and hence to the forms of the understanding or the categories. This means that on a Kantian understanding of the order of explanatory priority, we must first comprehend the inner logical dimension of form of which transcendental logic treats if we wish to arrive at a proper appreciation of how, via an abstraction, we may arrive at a proper comprehension of the comparatively outer logical dimension of mere form of which pure logical treats - that dimension of form which the rationalist logician, in accordance with his logically thin conception of reason, takes to be self-standingly available.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“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.”
― A.W. Carus, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment

“There is no thinking the form of thought from outside of thought. This yields a very different understanding of why there is no position from which we can do something which can qualify as 'apprehending a logically alien thought ' - where this is supposed to qualify as doing something that is at the same time a case of apprehending that which we do in thinking and a case of apprehending a form of activity that is comprehensible to us, as such, only from outside (only from a position that cannot be available to us in and through engaging in that form of activity).”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Here is another way of putting an aspect of that same parallel: just as The Critique of Pure Reason seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of an object presuppose a form of synthesis that belongs to the understanding, so, too, the Tractatus seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of the identity of a sign presupposes linguistic self-consciousness of the logical nexus of the symbol. Just as Kant seeks to show how, on the one hand, the understanding must bear on sensibility in order to have content (for it to represent anything), and how, on the other, the sensible manifold requires conferral of unity through the activity of the understanding to be more than merely blind (for it to amount to more than mere sensory noise); so, too, later Wittgenstein aims to show how, on the one hand, the symbol must find expression in the sign to be more than nothing (for it to say anything), and how, on the other, the form of the sign (in spoken language—its phonological form) presupposes the apprehension of its real possibilities for symbolizing (its logico-grammatical uses in acts of speech) in order for it to come into view as having the form that it does.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Кстати, ведь все.. выжившие или, точнее, выжитые из своих умов, выселенные, так сказать, из всех двенадцати кантовских категорий рассудка, естественно, принуждены ютиться в какой-нибудь тринадцатой категории, этакой логической боковушке, лишь кой-как прислонённой к объективно обязательному мышлению.”
― Сигизмунд Кржижановский, Воспоминания о будущем. Избранное из неизданного

“Hegel was an advocate of panlogism: reason is literally everywhere. Existence is made of reason, hence existence is entirely knowable. Reality is constituted by the mind and is its construction. Given that mind can know everything it made, there is no unknowable, noumenal world. If mind creates everything, there is nothing outside mind, no noumenal objects existing independently of mind.”
― Mike Hockney, Magic, Matter and Qualia

“If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us”
― Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach And the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy

“The book review pages of those journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might not after all be achievable on modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“Todos los estoicos pues, y no solamente Marco Aurelio, se habrían podido suscribir a las dos formulaciones kantianas del imperativo categórico: «Actúa únicamente según la máxima que hace que puedas querer, al mismo tiempo, que se convierta en ley universal.» «Actúa como si la máxima de tu acción tuviese que erigirse, por medio de tu voluntad, en ley universal de la Naturaleza,»6 No hay que decir: Marco Aurelio escribe corno si hubiera leído la Crítica de la razón practica sino más bien: Kant emplea estas fórmulas porque, entre otros, ha leído a los estoicos.”
― Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

“They agree only on the point that the most important aspect is reason. For one entire evening they play around with the metaphor of the light of reason that illuminates everything equally and dispassionately. Gertruda remarks immediately and intelligently that wherever something’s brightly lit, there is also a shadow, a darkening. The more powerful the light, the deeper, the more intense the shadow. That’s true, that’s a little bit disturbing; they stop talking for a while.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves. Do you really believe the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish?”
― Fred Uhlman, Reunion

“Hegel also pointed out that part of the content of the division of time into past, present, or future seemed able to transcend these temporal units because the parts in question were simply true. Time does not seem to matter to things like triangles or tripods because their qualities are either timeless or eternal. A future triangle would be like any triangle past or present. Truth, in other words, seems either to eradicate time or, at least, to take the temporality out of time. In the terms that Hegel began to establish, Kant’s disquieting claim about the injustice built into time, history, and progress began to look more surmountable. On one side, there was a world made up of moments, some present, some past, some future. The future would turn into the present and negate itself. The present would turn into the past but could still be available in the present. The passage of time and the endless stream of negations of negations built into the human ability to make choices and decisions would give rise to many diferent values, arrangements, and worldviews. Some, however, might turn out to be true. This was the hallmark of the other side of human history. If something was true, it would fall out of time and become, simply, timeless. On Kant’s terms, time and history were the problem. On Hegel’s terms, they were the solution.”
― Michael Sonenscher, After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought

“Kant noted that we typically apply labels or concepts to the world to classify sensory inputs that suit a purpose. ... Beautiful objects do not serve ordinary human purposes, as plates and spoons do. A beautiful rose pleases us, but not because we necessarily want to eat it or even pick it for a flower arrangement. Kant’s way of recognizing this was to say that something beautiful has purposiveness without a purpose’.”
― Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction

“Hume emphasized education and experience: men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. Such people, he felt, eventually will reach consensus, and in doing so, they set a ‘standard of taste’ which is universal. … Hume said men of taste must ‘preserve minds free from prejudice’, but thought no one should enjoy immoral attitudes or ‘vicious manners’ in art … Kant too spoke about judgements of taste but he was more concerned with explaining judgements of Beauty.
He aimed to show that good judgements in aesthetics are grounded in features of artworks themselves, not just in us and our preferences. Kant tried to describe our human abilities to perceive and categorize the world around us. There is a complex interplay among our mental faculties including perception, imagination, and intellect or judgement. Kant held that in order to function in the world to achieve our human purposes, we label much of what we sense, often in fairly unconscious ways.”
― Cynthia A. Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Cynthia Freeland, Oxford University Press

“How do you explain the law and order in nature?" we ask the philosophers. All except Kant reply by assuming law and order somewhere, and then showing how we can recognise it.

In explaining our notions, philosophers from other than the Kantian standpoint, assume the notions as existing outside us, and then it is no difficult task to show how they come to us, either by inspiration or by observation.

We ask "Why do we have an idea of law in nature?" "Because natural processes go according to law", we are answered, "and experience inherited or acquired, gives us this notion". But when we speak about the law in nature we are speaking about a notion of our own. So all that these expositors do is to explain our notion by an assumption of it.”
― Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension