Karl Jaspers Quotes.
Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.
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.
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.
When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
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 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
Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.
At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
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.
What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.
A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn’t. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The moment is the sole reality.
Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.
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.
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
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.
Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process; he is not merely an extant life, but is, within that life, endowed with possibilities through the freedom he possesses to make of himself what he will by the activities on which he decides.
the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
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 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.
Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character
Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.
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.
Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life’s work.
