Karl Jaspers Quotes
The general fellowship of our human situation has been rendered even more dubious than before, inasmuch as, though the old ties of caste have been loosened, a new restriction of the individual to some prescribed status in society is manifest. Less than ever, perhaps, is it possible for a man to transcend the limitations imposed by his social origins.
Karl Jaspers
Quotes to Explore
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.
Karl Jaspers
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.
Karl Jaspers
With the disintegration of all that Nietzsche had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition.
Karl Jaspers
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
Karl Jaspers
Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.
Karl Jaspers
As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Karl Jaspers
'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.
Karl Jaspers
No one is guiltless...But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt.
Karl Jaspers
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.
Karl Jaspers
At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
Karl Jaspers
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.
Karl Jaspers
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
Karl Jaspers