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.
Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.
We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
The problem with Germans is that they look in the clouds for what lies at their feet.
Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.
The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.
Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.
What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.
Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age.
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.
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!
Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind.
There are three stages in the revelation of truth. The first is to be ridiculed, the second is to be resisted and the third is to be considered self-evident.