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
Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.
Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.
On the path of actions, great heart is the chief recommendation; on that works, a great head.
In truth the most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.
The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.
Reasonable and vicious are quite consistent with each other, in fact, only through their union are great and far-reaching crimes possible
To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake
There is only one inborn erroneous notion that we exist in order to be happy So long as we persist in this inborn error the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of disappointment.
As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime.
A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author’s thoughts. The value of these thoughts lies either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form in which he develops his matter — that is to say, what he has thought about it.