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

Interpretation

What this quote means

The value of one's existence is determined by how deeply one connects with and understands their historical roots.

In this quote, Karl Jaspers emphasizes the significance of understanding and integrating historical contexts into one's identity. He suggests that an individual's essence and worth can be gauged by the extent to which they engage with these historical origins, reflecting the interplay between personal identity and collective history.

Themes

IdentityHistorySelf-DiscoveryAwarenessPhilosophy

In practice

Example use cases

In a lecture about personal growth, one might say, 'As Karl Jaspers noted, our identity is deeply tied to our historical origins.'

More from 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 JaspersRead
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.
Karl JaspersRead
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
Karl JaspersRead
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 JaspersRead
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.
Karl JaspersRead
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 JaspersRead

Similar quotes

Anytime I meet people who got to make the deliberate choice, whose parents chose Canada, I'm jealous. Because I think being able to choose it, rather than being Canadian by default, is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada.
Justin TrudeauRead
I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings
John Stuart MillRead
It is good to have an intellectual awareness of our dependence upon God - to understand how great He is and how very small we are in His sight.
Mother AngelicaRead
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.
Jose MartiRead
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
Albert CamusRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.