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
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.
...in the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone.
Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.
To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.