Karl Jaspers Quotes

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense. The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits or gods

The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.

You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.

I don't think I'm ever going to have the kind of life or schedule that I can really have a steady way of doing things.

I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume it's what I said.

Do you really think he untied you? .. He was just checking his kids handiwork.

Sometimes the songs you think will be best don't turn out to be best.

Life doesn't happen in chapters - at least, not regular ones.

I was working in the States when Brexit was going on back home in England. I often think that maybe I got a little complacent on the situation since I wasn't physically there. That's when I realized, Wow, anything is possible.

Anything and everything at any given time is sort of the point I think. We're dealing in real situations and that's why we have our handlers there, to hopefully protect us from the bad, but yes; each show I think that sort of thing is going to go down because it's obviously not a perfect system and it's not a perfect world.

I guess I don't think about age too much. I've always felt older than I really am anyway. I'm not dreading getting older. I don't miss the anxiety of being younger and not knowing what you want or where you’re going.

I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.

You might be thinking who is this Harry Potter girl? And what is she doing up on stage at the UN. It's a good question and trust me I have been asking myself the same thing. I don't know if I am qualified to be here. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

We are never really in control. We just think we are when things happen to be going our way.

How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?

On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!