Top 18 Kant Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Kant Quotes from famous people such as Ian Hacking, Alain de Botton, Paul Engle, Roger Penrose, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules o

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.
Ian Hacking
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Alain de Botton
For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
Paul Engle
Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
Roger Penrose
My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.
Barbara Sukowa
Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo.
Jose Clemente Orozco
The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
Bryan Magee
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.
William James
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.
Timothy Morton
The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.
Karl Kraus
Immanuel Kant famously claimed that ‘he who wills the ends wills the means,’ but he never spent much time in Washington.
Elliott Abrams
Kant’s style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.
Alfred Nobel
I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant’s idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it’s an evolved machine that we carry with us.
Bernard Beckett
I had to read Plato and Kant, and at times I was overwhelmed. But I have always been fearless, and so was Hannah Arendt. She wasn’t afraid to speak out when she knew her opinions would not be popular because she believed in the public discourse above all.
Barbara Sukowa
The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.
Josiah Royce