Immanuel Kant Quotes

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

People are not stupid.

The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

If all you have is faith, then you never actually know anything.

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.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines.

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

... I distrust manifest knowledge.

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.

Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.

The things of which we want the proof are those we know the best.

I believe in order that I may understand.

In formulating any philosophy the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, 'My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.

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