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
Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.
True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.
It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
For where did Dante take the material of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.
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.
Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other
Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.
There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
Newspapers are the second hand of history.