A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.
--Karl Jaspers
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
Elections give the illusion of freedom but are in fact a game among the powers that be, this is why we talk of 'formal democracy.' Instead of drawing forth the best energies of a people, this legal institution hands actual control to very different forces, turning democracy into another form of oligarchy and dictatorship.
--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
Imminent seems the collapse of that which for millennium has constituted man's universe. The new world which has arisen as an apparatus for supply of the necessaries of life compels everything and everyone to serve it.
--Karl Jaspers
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
Less than ever, perhaps, is it possible for a man to transcend the limitations imposed by his social origins.
--Karl Jaspers
Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process...
--Karl Jaspers
Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness.
--Karl Jaspers
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
Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.
--Karl Jaspers
Our questions and answers are in part determined by the historical tradition in which we find ourselves.
--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
The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units.
--Karl Jaspers
The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties.
--Karl Jaspers
The moment is the sole reality.
--Karl Jaspers
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
The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.
--Karl Jaspers
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
--Karl Jaspers
What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.
--Karl Jaspers
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
Found 21 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).