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
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.
... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life. preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
Hence, in all countries the chief occupation of society is card-playing, and it is the gauge of its value, and an outward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!
The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.
there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.