Karl Jaspers Quotes

Don't read a book and be a follower; read a book and be a student.

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

I'm raised to actually think, to use my brain.

I myself owe everything to French books. They developed in my soul the sentiments of humanity which had been stifled by eight years of fanatical and servile education.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.

Education is gathering information and reading... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it.

People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.

Education made us what we are.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it .... For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Education is the development of power and ideal.

It is hardly plausible to view a whole succession of logics as an evolutionary and functional program of innate wiring, particularly in light of the fact that the most mature logical structures are reached only by some adults.

I reserve the right to think many different things and to change my mind and to even be wrong.

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

The fruit of liberal education is not learning, but the capacity and desire to learn, not knowledge, but power.

Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn't make up yourself - a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.

I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.