75 Quotes by Karl Jaspers

Tragedy occurs whenever awareness exceeds power; and particularly where awareness of a major need exceeds the power to satisfy it.

Truth and reality split apart.

Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.

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.

Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.

The battle is a collision of power, of gods themselves: man is only a pawn in these terrible games, or their scene, or their medium; but man's greatness consists precisely in his act of becoming such medium. By this act he becomes imbued with a soul and identical with the powers.

Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.

Can truth be found? Is it possible to live with truth? All life-force stems from blindness. It grows from imagined knowledge, in myth taken for faith, and in the substitute myths; in unquestioning acceptance, and in mind-narrowing untruths. Within the human predicament the quest for truth presents an impossible task.

L'homme ne prend conscience de son être que dans les situations limites. [Autobiographie philosophique (1963)]