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
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.
Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.
Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other
All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.
The reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment.
Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.
A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
...In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met...
The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.