See main: Abraham and Brahma

“A living organism is both cause and effect of itself.”

— Immanuel Kant (1790), Critic on Judgment; cited by Lotka (pg. 346)

“I am proficient in twelve languages, I will not learn a thirteenth.”

— Abraham Kaestner (c.1795), quip on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [7]

“With the blade of his criticism, his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, the executioner, beheaded belief in god. God, therefore, became now a fiction.”

— Heinrich Heine (c.1835), Werke, Volume Nine; cited by Vincent Miceli (1971) in The Gods of Atheism (pg. xix)

“The first attempt to explain the constitution and the mechanical origin of the world in a simple manner by ‘Newtonian laws’ — that is, by mathematical and physical laws—was made by Immanuel Kant in the famous work of his youth (1755), General History of the Earth and Theory of the Heavens. Unfortunately, this distinguished and daring work remained almost unknown for ninety years; it was only disinterred in 1845 by Alexander Humboldt in the first volume of his Cosmos.”

— Ernst Haeckel (1899), The Riddle of the Universe [12]

“Goethe stands far above any of Kant's successors in wisdom and an almost instinctive recognition of the truth. In judgment he surpassed his scientific contemporaries like Humboldt almost as much as in philosophical intuition he surpassed Schelling.”

— Lawrence Henderson (1917), The Order of Nature [10]

“Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton are both considered to comprise the smartest people to have ever lived. Based on some recent IQ conjectures, both of the above supposedly had IQ’s beyond the 250 mark.”

— Rork Azak (2011), “Comment to article on Eudoxus” (Ѻ), Nov 14

“It is certain that man derives all his concepts and representations from the impressions which the universe makes upon him through his body, even the power of comparing and combining these impressions, which may be called the faculty of thought.”

— Immanuel Kant (1755), Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens [15]

“The excellence of thinking natures, their quickness of apprehension, the clarity and vividness of their conceptions, which come to them from the impressions of the external world, their capacity to combine these concepts, and finally, their practical efficiency, in short their entire extent of their perfection, becomes higher and more completed in proportion to their remoteness of their dwelling place from the sun.”

— Immanuel Kant (1755), Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens [15]

“The higher beings of these other worldly spheres must ‘view a Newton’ as we ‘view a Hottentot’ or an ape.”

— Immanuel Kant (1755), Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens; paraphrase, supposedly, of Alexander Pope’s 1734 ‘ shew’d a Newton as we shew an ape’ (Essay on Man) [16]

“Individual men, and even whole nations, little think, while they are pursuing their own purposes that they are advancing unconsciously under the guidance of a purpose of nature which is unknown to them.”

— Immanuel Kant (1784), “Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” [9]

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

— Immanuel Kant (1788), Critique of Practical Reason (Ѻ)

“That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to mechanical laws, that life should have sprung from the nature of what is lifeless, that matter should have been able to dispose itself into the form of a self-maintaining purposiveness — this [Blumenbach] rightly declares to be contradictory to reason.”

— Immanuel Kant (1790), Critique of Judgment [1]

“It is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who shall make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no design has ordered.”

— Immanuel Kant (1790), Critique of Judgment [6]

“There is only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

— Immanuel Kant (1797), Metaphysics of Morals (Ѻ)

“Hume awoke me from my dogmatic slumber.”

— Immanuel Kant (c.1760) [13]

“That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to mechanical laws, that life should have sprung from the nature of what is lifeless, that matter should have been able to dispose itself into the form of a self-maintaining purposiveness—that [is] contradictory to reason.”

— Immanuel Kant (c.1770), Publication; cited by Peter Hoffmann (2012) in Life’s Ratchet (pg. #)