Immanuel Kant Quotes

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

One can state, without exaggeration, that the observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.

Human knowledge is dark and uncertain; philosophy is dark, astrology is dark, and geometry is dark.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas but its earlier stages.

Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.