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

Karl Jaspers

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Karl Jaspers
Age: 86 †
Born: 1883
Born: February 23
Died: 1969
Died: February 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Oldenburg (Oldb)
Karl Theodor Jaspers
Philosopher
Foolish
Decide
Seemed
Poet
Stupid
Become

More quotes by Karl Jaspers

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A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.
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Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character
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Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.
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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.
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Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.
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My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
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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.
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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.
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Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
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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.
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We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
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At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
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Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.
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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.
Karl Jaspers
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Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.
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The moment is the sole reality.
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As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Karl Jaspers
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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.
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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.
Karl Jaspers
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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