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
Arthur Schopenhauer quotes about
I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.
Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.