Quotes by Karl Jaspers

About Karl Jaspers:

Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept this label.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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.

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

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 ...

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

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.

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

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

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

Karl Jaspers

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.

Karl Jaspers

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.

Karl Jaspers

Author Bio

  • NameKarl Jaspers
  • DescriptionGerman psychiatrist and philosopher
  • BornFebruary 23, 1883
  • DiedFebruary 26, 1969
  • CountryGermany; Switzerland
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Psychiatrist; Author; Physician
  • AwardsOrder Of Merit For Arts And Science; Goethe Prize; Erasmus Prize; Peace Prize Of The German Book Trade