Immanuel Kant Quotes

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.

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.

Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

It would be superfluous to receive by faith, things that can be known by natural reason

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.

I want to discover a truth for myself that is really true. Whether it's a piece of scientific knowledge, or a philosophical truth.

This then is the age of reason.

Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

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

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

Philosophy is the science which considers truth.

Say first, of god above or man below; what can we reason but from what we know.

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

Hegel said that 'truth' is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any 'truth' above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.

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

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.