Immanuel Kant Quotes

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

We can't assume what we don't believe.

Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.

'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

People would rather believe than know.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

Religions do not teach doubt.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.

I wouldn't like to be a non-believer in anything.

Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

We all have our beliefs or our agnosticism.