Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauerwas a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, in which he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind, insatiable, and malignant metaphysical will. Proceeding from the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism, rejecting the contemporaneous post-Kantian philosophies of German idealism. Schopenhauer was among the first thinkers in Western...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth22 February 1788
CountryGermany
I know of no more beautiful prayer than that which the Hindus of old used in closing: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.
[Malebranche] teaches that we see all things in God himself. This is certainly equivalent to explaining something unknown by something even more unknown. Moreover, according to him, we see not only all things in God, but God is also the sole activity therein, so that physical causes are so only apparently; they are merely occasional causes. ( Recherches de la vérité , Livre VI, seconde partie, chap. 3.) And so here we have essentially the pantheism of Spinoza who appears to have learned more from Malebranche than from Descartes.
That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!
To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.
For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.
Mostly the loss teaches us only about the value of things.
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.
For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms; they shine only when it is dark.
My body and my will are one.
The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending.
The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.
The old woman dies, the burden is lifted.
A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.