Quotes from Karl Jaspers

For one wishing to philosophize, it is particular, indeed of crucial importance to ascertain the difference between the object cognition that is achieved in the sciences and the transcending thought that characterizes philosophy......which transcend[s] the limits of the knowable and of the world as a whole, so that through these limits we become aware of the phenomenality of empirical existence and hence of the Comprehensive nature of being, thus entering into the area of faith.

For one wishing to philosophize, it is particular, indeed of crucial importance to ascertain the difference between the object cognition that which is achieved in the sciences and the transcending thought that characterizes philosophy......which transcend[s] the limits of the knowable and of the world as a whole, so that through these limits we become aware of the phenomenality of empirical existence and hence of the Comprehensive nature of being, thus entering into the area of faith.

Then the exception would be as if he did not exist at all.

Can truth be found? Is it possible to live with truth? All life-force stems from blindness. It grows from imagined knowledge, in myth taken for faith, and in the substitute myths; in unquestioning acceptance, and in mind-narrowing untruths. Within the human predicament the quest for truth presents an impossible task.

Beszélni valamirÅ'l annyi, mint értelmezni azt.

Az ember alapjában véve több annál, mint amit megtudhatunk róla.

The individual who can help himself is precisely the one who wills that authority exist in the world.

Cuando tenía dieciocho años me vino el pensamiento de abandonar la Iglesia. Era para mí una exigencia de autenticidad, porque el pertenecer a la Iglesia no constituía algo indiferente, sino realmente una confesión, y una confesión tal, que fomentaba mucha necedad en el mundo, puesto que con ella existía una institución que sembraba el error. (...) Entre el destino y la voluntad / Schicksal und Wille

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.

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

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

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

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

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

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

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

The moment is the sole reality.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.