Immanuel Kant Quotes

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

The mind resorts to reason for want of training.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.

The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

I have a massive divide between being a competent human being and being completely hopeless, when it comes to logic.

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.

I possess a strong sense of reason.

One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason.

It is not merely that Johnny can't read, or even that Johnny can't think. Johnny doesn't know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling. … The phrase ‘I feel’ is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term…

I like to regard myself as someone who's capable of critical thought, that is to say, who can evaluate claims.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

It is hardly plausible to view a whole succession of logics as an evolutionary and functional program of innate wiring, particularly in light of the fact that the most mature logical structures are reached only by some adults.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.