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
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
Interpretation
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.
In practice
In a lecture about personal growth, one might say, 'As Karl Jaspers noted, our identity is deeply tied to our historical origins.'
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.
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.
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
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.
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.
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
In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
Accept everything just the way it is.
Wouldn't it be better to have a watertight law designed to catch the guilty, rather than a press release law designed to catch the headlines?
We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.
Slavery is ...an atrocious debasement of human nature.
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