Karl Jaspers

Psychologist

1883-02-23

Quotes by Karl Jaspers

• Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it, so he thinks, I can make it my servant.

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• Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it, so he thinks, I can make it my servant.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.

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