Top 50 Karl Jaspers Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is the search for the truth, not possession of the truth which is the way of philosophy. Its questions are more relevant than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.”

— Karl Jaspers

2. “The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature.”

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

5. “A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn’t. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.”

— Karl Jaspers

6. “The moment is the sole reality.”

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

9. “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

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

12. “When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelming events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at an end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history.”

— Karl Jaspers

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Karl Jaspers

16. “The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.”

— Karl Jaspers

17. “When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.”

— Karl Jaspers

18. “On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.”

— Karl Jaspers

19. “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.”

— Karl Jaspers

20. “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.”

— Karl Jaspers

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Only a development of thought achieved through the self-education of the whole man can prevent any body of thought whatsoever from becoming a poison; can prevent enlightenment from becoming an agent of death.”

— Karl Jaspers

25. “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.”

— Karl Jaspers

26. “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

27. “Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life’s work.”

— Karl Jaspers

28. “Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.”

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

31. “Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.”

— Karl Jaspers

32. “Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.”

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

34. “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

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

— Karl Jaspers

36. “Truth and reality split apart.”

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

38. “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

39. “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.”

— Karl Jaspers

40. “We must all continuously recapture ourselves from indecision.”

— Karl Jaspers

41. “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

42. “Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them.”

— Karl Jaspers

43. “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

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

— Karl Jaspers

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

— Karl Jaspers

46. “Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. “Quite likely”, Schumpeter answered, “but what a fine laboratory”. “A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses”, Weber answered heatedly.”

— Karl Jaspers

47. “Even truth can be deceptive, whatever its appearance.”

— Karl Jaspers

48. “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

49. “Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.”

— Karl Jaspers

50. “The battle is a collision of power, of gods themselves: man is only a pawn in these terrible games, or their scene, or their medium; but man’s greatness consists precisely in his act of becoming such medium. By this act he becomes imbued with a soul and identical with the powers.”

— Karl Jaspers