Karl Jaspers quotes

Karl Jaspers was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who played a significant role in the development of existential philosophy. His work bridged the disciplines of psychiatry and philosophy, focusing on themes such as human freedom and the limits of knowledge. He made a lasting impact on modern thought through his writings and ideas about existence and transcendence. Here are 65 of his quotes:

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)
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community. View quote
Karl Jaspers
When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Only as an individual can man become a philosopher. View quote
Karl Jaspers
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. View quote
Karl Jaspers
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own. View quote
Karl Jaspers
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. View quote
Karl Jaspers
With the disintegration of all that [Nietzsche] had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition. View quote
Karl Jaspers
"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)
Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work. View quote
Karl Jaspers
No one is guiltless...But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Today war seems to have undergone a change of meaning, insofar as it is not a war of religion but a war of interests, not a war of conflicting cultures or civilizations but a war of national areas, not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non–combatant population. View quote
Karl Jaspers
The mass-man has very little spare time, does not live a life that appertains to a whole, does not want to exert himself except for some concrete aim which can be expressed in terms of utility; he will not wait patiently while things ripen; everything for him must provide some immediate gratification; and even his mental life must minister to his fleeting pleasures. That is why the essay has become the customary form of literature, why newspapers are taking the place of books... People read quickly and cursorily. View quote
Karl Jaspers
The would-be climber must be able to make himself liked ... please his superiors - avoid showing independence except in those matters wherein independence is expected of him by his chiefs... the winners in the race have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves. Hence the winners snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere standards. View quote
Karl Jaspers
We cannot avoid conflict, conflict with society, other individuals and with oneself. 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. View quote
Karl Jaspers
In the life of the mass-order, the culture of the generality tends to conform to the demands of the average human being. Spirituality decays through being diffused among the masses when knowledge is impoverished in every possible way by rationalisation until it becomes accessible to the crude understanding of all. View quote
Karl Jaspers
It is questionable whether there does not exist in man an obscure and blind will to make war; an impulse towards change, towards emergence from the familiarities of everyday life and from the stabilities of well-known conditions - something like a will to death as a will to annihilation and self-sacrifice, a vague enthusiasm for the upbuilding of a new world. (Karl Jaspers)
At the parting of ways in the life-order, where the question is between the new creation or decay, that man will be decisive for new creation who is able on his own initiative to seize the helm and steer a course of his own choosing - even if that course be opposed to the will of the masses. Should the emergence of such persons become impossible a lamentable shipwreck will be inevitable. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Rohde became more and more firmly bound to the bourgeois world, its institutions and accepted opinions. ... The contrast between the two natures makes Rohde and Nietzsche exemplary representatives of two distinctive worlds. In their youth they both live in the realm of boundless possibilities and feel an affinity through the exuberance of their noble aspirations. Subsequently they go in opposite directions. Nietzsche remains young, leaving concrete reality as his task assumes existential import. Rohde grows old, bourgeois, stable, and skeptical. Hence courage is a fundamental trait in Nietzsche, plaintive self-irony in Rohde. ... Rohde retained the interests but not the attitudes of his youth; he looked to the world of the Greeks for the object of his contemplation rather than the norm of obligation. View quote
Karl Jaspers
If the result of a war is to change nothing, but only to destroy, with the mere result that a group of human beings who do not differ notably from the conquered acquires preponderant advantages for the future, there is lacking the affective strength of an existence that has inspired faith, of an existence whose destiny would have been decided by the war. View quote
Karl Jaspers
[S]ome went through the whole disrupting experience of national indignity as early as 1933, others after June 1934, still others in 1938 during the Jewish pogroms, many in the years since 1942, when defeat became probable, or since 1943 when it because certain, and some not until it actually happened in 1945. View quote
Karl Jaspers