Immanuel Kant citáty

page 5

„Všetko naše poznanie začína zmyslami, pokračuje pochopením a končí dôvodom.“

„Človek, ktorý prejavuje krutosť voči zvieratám, nie je o nič menej zatvrdnutý ani voči ľuďom. Ľudské srdce môžeme spoznávať aj vo vzťahu k zvieratám.“

„Muž je žiarlivý, keď miluje; žena i keď nemiluje.“

„Keby ľudia boli schopní navzájom si čítať myšlienky, vyhýbali by sa jeden druhému.“

„Ženy sú ako španielske domy. Majú veľa dverí a málo okien. Je ľahšie vniknúť do ich sŕdc, ako do nich nahliadnuť.“

„Proti trampotám života dal Boh človeku tri veci - nádej, spánok a smiech.“

„Nebo obdarilo ľudí na zmiernenie útrap života tromi vecami - nádejou, spánkom a smiechom.“

„Najmenej sa boja smrti tí, ktorých život má najväčšiu cenu.“

„Vnímajme život ako detskú hru, v ktorej ide len o čestnosť, dobré srdce, a povinnosť voči sebe samému.“

„Pozitívne dobro, ktoré môžu vlády vykonať, je obmedzené na odstraňovanie prekážok k dobrému životu.“

„Človeka, ktorý si zlomil nohu, môžeme v jeho nešťastí trochu utešiť, keď mu pripomenieme, že si mohol rovnako dobre zlomiť väzy.“

„Ženská osobnosť je ako more - rozochveje ju najslabší závan a pritom unesie najťažšie bremená.“

„Keď sa úprimne a dôkladne porovnávame s mravným zákonom, s jeho posvätnosťou a prísnosťou, musí z toho nevyhnutne plynúť opravdivá pokora. Avšak to, že sme schopní takéhoto vnútorného zákonodarstva, že fyzický človek sa cíti nútený uctiť si vo svojej vlastnej osobe morálneho človeka, ho zároveň povznáša a dáva mu to najvyššie sebaocenie ako pocit jeho vnútornej hodnoty, na základe ktorej nie je za žiadnu cenu podkupný a má nepomíňajúcu sa hodnotu, čo mu vštepuje úctu voči sebe samému.“

„Jednou z najväčších a najčistejších radostí je oddych po práci.“

„Prvou starosťou človeka by nemalo byť šťastie, ale to, aby bol toho šťastia hodný.“

„Keď sa to vezme v celku, čím sú ľudia civilizovanejší, tým sú väčší herci.“

„Aj tá najúprimnejšia žena skrýva na dne svojho srdca nejaké tajomstvo.“

„Neschopnosť utvoriť si úsudok je vlastne to, čomu hovoríme hlúposť a proti tomuto neduhu niet pomoci.“

„Nevyhnutnými podmienkami čistého rozumu sú - Boh, sloboda a nesmrteľnosť.“

„Nie sme na svete preto, aby sme boli šťastní, ale preto, aby sme plnili svoje povinnosti.“

„Čím máme viac lásky, tým sa ľahšie pretĺkame svetom.“

„Človek je jediný živočích, ktorý musí pracovať.“

„Prečítal som v živote mnoho múdrych a dobrých kníh. Ani v jednej som však nenašiel nič, čo by ma tak uspokojilo a potešilo moje srdce, ako tieto slová 23. žalmu: "Ty, Pane, si so mnou."“

„Vedieť, načo by bolo rozumné sa opýtať, je veľký a potrebný dôkaz inteligencie a pochopenia.“

„Človek sa nemôže stať človekom iba vychovaním.“

„Lekári si myslia, že ktovieako pomohli chorému, keď chorobe dali vhodné meno.“

„Ušľachtilý človek trpí utrpením druhých, ako by bol za nich zodpovedný.“

„Dobré činy len kvôli návyku prestávajú byť cnosťou. Dobro je len to, čo robíme zámerne.“

„Bez entuziazmu sa vo svete nič veľkého nevykonalo.“

„Milovať blížneho znamená rád plniť každú povinnosť, ktorú voči nemu mám.“

„Je možné, že nie všetko je pravda, čo človek za pravdu považuje, ale vo všetkom, čo hovorí, musí byť pravdovravný.“

„Manželstvo, to je spojenie dvoch osôb rozličného pohlavia k celoživotnému vzájomnému vlastnení svojich sexuálnych vlastností.“

„Môže byť niečo zvrátenejšie, ako hovoriť deťom o inom svete, keď sotva prišli na tento svet?“

„Múdreho možno ľahko presvedčiť, hlupáka len horko-ťažko prehovoriť.“

„Na človeku je jedine dobré - jeho dobrá vôľa.“

„Nedospelosť je neschopnosť používať svoj rozum bez cudzieho vedenia.“

„Niet nič praktickejšie ako dobrá teória.“

„Okrem dobrého úmyslu na svete niet ničoho, čo by bolo možno akceptovať bez výhrady.“

„Ženy jsou jako španělské domy. Mají mnoho dveří a málo oken. Je snažší uniknout do jejich srdcí, než do nich nahlédnout.“

„Vychovávanie je najväčší a najťažší problém, ktorý je možno človeku uložiť.“

„Nemáme do činenia s inými predmetmi ako tými, ktoré patria k možnej skúsenosti, lebo ak nám nemôžu byť dané v nijakej skúsenosti, potom sú pre nás ničím.“

„Akákoľvek sila sa pozná len vďaka prekážkam, ktoré dokáže prekonať.“

„Maj aj odvahu používať svoj vlastný rozum.“

„Posudzuj podľa takých zásad, o ktorých si presvedčený, že by bolo dobré, aby sa stali všeobecným zákonom.“

„Šťastie nie je ideálom rozumu, ale predstavivosti.“

“The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire "beautiful sex," should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous.
After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.”

“All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.”

“Here as elsewhere human reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.”

“I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

“Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.”

“It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.”

“All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”

“A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.”

“All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.”

“The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security.”

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

“The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.”

“When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”

“The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.”

“Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval;”

“The veneration of mighty invisible beings, which was extorted from helpless man through natural fear rooted in the sense of his impotence …”

“The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequendy transferred to man.”

“Newton… (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little. In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.”

“All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.”

“The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.”

“Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.”

“Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.”

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.”

“Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”

“Men will not understand … that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise.”

“Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.”

“This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject.”

“I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.”

“it is absurd … to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass ("Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" §75)”