Karl Jaspers Quotes

#1. On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.

Karl Jaspers

#2. Only a development of thought achieved through the self-education of the whole man can prevent any body of thought whatsoever from becoming a poison; can prevent enlightenment from becoming an agent of death.

Karl Jaspers

#3. As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

Karl Jaspers

#4. Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.

Karl Jaspers

#5. The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life.

Karl Jaspers

#6. There is no God, cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

Karl Jaspers

#7. Everything depends therefore on encountering thought at its source. Such thought is the reality of man's being, which achieved consciousness and understanding of itself through it.

Karl Jaspers

#8. I live in a kind of tension between the will to say yes to my suffering, and my inability to utter this yes with complete sincerity.

Karl Jaspers

#9. Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Karl Jaspers

#10. My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

Karl Jaspers

#11. Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

Karl Jaspers

#12. The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.

Karl Jaspers

#13. Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.

Karl Jaspers

#14. The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.

Karl Jaspers

#15. Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

Karl Jaspers

#16. I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

Karl Jaspers

#17. Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

Karl Jaspers

#18. What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.

Karl Jaspers

#19. I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.

Karl Jaspers

#20. What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated ... . We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.

Karl Jaspers

#21. The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

Karl Jaspers

#22. If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

Karl Jaspers

#23. At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.

Karl Jaspers

#24. With the disintegration of all that [Nietzsche] had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition.

Karl Jaspers

#25. To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

Karl Jaspers

#26. Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

Karl Jaspers

#27. The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.

Karl Jaspers

#28. Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character

Karl Jaspers

#29. Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.

Karl Jaspers

#30. The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is not one of submission, but of a contest for truth.

Karl Jaspers

#31. Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

Karl Jaspers

#32. The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature.

Karl Jaspers

#33. When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.

Karl Jaspers

#34. When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelming events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at an end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history.

Karl Jaspers

#35. Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.

Karl Jaspers

#36. All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education.

Karl Jaspers

#37. A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

Karl Jaspers

#38. Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.

Karl Jaspers

#39. Tragedy occurs whenever awareness exceeds power; and particularly where awareness of a major need exceeds the power to satisfy it.

Karl Jaspers

#40. Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

Karl Jaspers

#41. The moment is the sole reality.

Karl Jaspers

#42. Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them.

Karl Jaspers

#43. We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.

Karl Jaspers

#44. Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.

Karl Jaspers