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

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.
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

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
Karl Jaspers

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
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

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

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.
Karl Jaspers