Karl Jaspers Quotes
Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character
What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
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.
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.
Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.
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
A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.
At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
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.
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.
The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature.
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.
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.
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.
When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.
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.
All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education.
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.
As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
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.
Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.