A German philosopher who was deeply influenced by the ideas of the German Dominican theologian, mystic, and eclectic philosopher Meister Eckhart,
the German mystic and theosophist Jakob Boehme, and other great scholars of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
He is most famous for his work The World as Will and Representation. He is commonly known for having espoused a sort of philosophical pessimism
that saw life as being essentially evil and futile.
He was also influenced by Eastern thought, so he saw hope in aesthetics, sympathy for others and ascetic living. His ideas profoundly
influenced the fields of philosophy, psychology, and literature.
(1788-1860)
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed;
second, it is violently opposed; and third,
it is accepted as self-evident.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount
of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what
no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees. … But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, ''Lighthouses''
as the poet said ''erected in the sea of time.'' They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it
is quite obvious that there is
nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
No one can transcend their own individuality.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken
myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am
the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries.
That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
My guiding star in all seriousness has been truth. Following it, I could first aspire only to my
own approval, entirely averted from an age that has sunk low as regards all higher intellectual efforts, and
from a national literature demoralised but for the exceptions, a literature in which the art of combining lofty
words with low sentiments has reached its zenith.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
A word too much always defeats its purpose.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature.
His most famous work is the poetic, alchemical drama in two parts, "Faust". Like the famous character of this poem, Goethe was
interested in alchemy. He also made important discoveries in connection with plant and animal life, and evolved a non-Newtonian and
unorthodox theory of the character of light and color.
He is considered one of the greatest contributors of the German Romantic period.
(1749-1832)
Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.
~ Dante Alighieri
Whatever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves ... how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.
~ James Leigh Hunt
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
~ Maximilien Robespierre
