Karl Jaspers Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.”

“My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”