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
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
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reason is accessible to all and can be discovered through individual thought.
Karl Jaspers suggests that reason is a fundamental aspect of human understanding that is universally available. It is an 'open secret' that requires personal reflection and thought for one to achieve understanding, as it invites everyone to engage with it on their own terms.
Themes
ReasonThoughtUnderstandingPhilosophySelf-Reflection
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a classroom setting to illustrate the importance of critical thinking.
More from Karl Jaspers
All quotes βThe 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
Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.
Karl JaspersRead
Similar quotes
I can show you that the art of calculation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other.
PlatoRead
In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
Eric HofferRead
I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.
Sylvia PlathRead
For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in.
Bruce SpringsteenRead
Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan.
Elaine PagelsRead