Karl Jaspers

The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of…

— Karl Jaspers

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

What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that…

— Karl Jaspers

“But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral…

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying…

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate…

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

There is no God, cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of…

— Karl Jaspers

“The limits of science have always been the source of bitter disappointment when people expected something from science that it was not…

— Karl Jaspers

The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him…

— Karl Jaspers

“Man's primary will to know struggles against the selfsatisfied formalism of empty learning which drugs man into the illusory calm of fulfillment.…

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically…

— Karl Jaspers

Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater…

— Karl Jaspers

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of…

— Karl Jaspers

“The battle is a collision of power, of gods themselves: man is only a pawn in these terrible games, or their scene,…

— Karl Jaspers

“To philosophize is to learn to die – philosophizing is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as…

— Karl Jaspers

When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and…

— Karl Jaspers

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names…

— Karl Jaspers