Immanuel Kant Quotes

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

I'm interested in philosophy, I studied it, and I also admit I try to read things that are way above me. I have a limit: I take what I need from it, and I do find that some of my favourite philosophical writings tend to be poppier. I admire smart people who are able to describe things simply or in a human, readable way.

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

All our science and philosophy form only an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of mystery. The larger the island grows, the longer the shoreline where the known meets the unknown.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any religion or opinion.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

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.

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

I know that I don’t know.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.