Immanuel Kant Quotes

Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

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.

Subjectivity and objectivity commit a series of assaults on each other during a human life out of which the first one suffers the worse beating.

A feeling is not a fact.

When real is gone, then there is no longer a litmus test for that which deviates from it. It's all real because it's all 'real.'

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise.

Perception is reality. People take what they want to from things.

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.

Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.

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