Karl Jaspers Quotes

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Sometimes I feel I'm living a meaningless life, and I get frightened.

People are scared man, they're scared of the void.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.

Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

My apprehension comes in crowds, I dread the rustling of the grass, The very shadows of the clouds, Have power to shake me as they pass, I question things and do not find, one that will answer to my mind, And all the world appears unkind.

Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

This is the century of fear.

I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.

Possibility is far more frightening than impossibility.

Who is not afraid of pure space - that breathtaking empty space of an open door?

The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is a part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.

it is the possibilities which are the most terrible things in life.

I think most people are afraid of what they don't know.

Not knowing the thing that's chasing you is a lot scarier than seeing it right in front of you.

I'm scared of the unknown future.

I find looking forward scary because you might die.

At the heart of any terror is the fear of losing what we find meaningful.

The unknown is always frightening.

Having a blank slate is sometimes as daunting as it is exciting.