As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Karl Jaspers
2
At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
Karl Jaspers
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
If we do hot wish to slip back, nothing must be forgotten; but if philosophising is to be genuine our thoughts must arise from our own source.
Karl Jaspers
8
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
Karl Jaspers
9
Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.
Karl Jaspers
10
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
11
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
12
Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.
Karl Jaspers
13
Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
Karl Jaspers
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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
