Immanuel Kant Quotes

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Even as one and the same person is called by different names according to the different functions he performs, so also one and the same mind is called by the different names: mind, intellect, memory, and egoity, on account of the difference in the modes - and not because of any real difference.

It's one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it.

Kant ... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them.

I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

There is no single truth, but each of the scholarly disciplines has methods which lead one ever closer to the truth.

We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

Knowledge , surely, is always of time , whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

Just as man's physical existence was liberated when he grasped that 'nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed', so his consciousness will be liberated when grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed - that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand.

The Man That Knowz Something Knowz That He Knowz Nothing At All.

Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one's own awareness is direct knowledge.

The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.

In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.