Quotes from Karl Jaspers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.

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

Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such--an indelible claim beyond morally meaningful duty. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive.

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.

Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.

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.

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

Every truth that we may think complete will prove itself untruth at the moment of shipwreck.

Truth and reality split apart.

Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure: whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honestly, in silence before the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.

We must all continuously recapture ourselves from indecision.