Top 575 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Schopenhauer - Page 10

Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.

A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.

If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.

He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.

...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.

To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world , and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason , this and nothing else is philosophy.

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

Although as a rule the absurd culminates, and it seems impossible for the voice of the individual ever to penetrate through the chorus of foolers and fooled, still there is left to the genuine works of all times a quite peculiar, silent, slow, and powerful influence; and as if by a miracle, we see them rise at last out of the turmoil like a balloon that floats up out of the thick atmosphere of this globe into purer regions. Having once arrived there, it remains at rest, and no one can any longer draw it down again.

We should comfort ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages-stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.

Motives are causes experienced from within.

The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.

The world is my representation

Genius is to other gifts what the carbuncle is to the precious stones. It sends forth its own light, whereas other stones only reflect borrowed light.

There are three stages in the revelation of truth. The first is to be ridiculed, the second is to be resisted and the third is to be considered self-evident.

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

On the path of actions, great heart is the chief recommendation; on that works, a great head.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending.

Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.

A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles, for then he is off his guard.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

Truth is most beautiful undraped.

We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.

JedeTrennung gibt einenVorgeschmack desTodesund jedes Wiedersehen einenVorgeschmack der Auferstehung. Every parting is a foretaste of death, and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection.

[T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror.

Wealth as well as sea water. The more we drink, the more thirsty. The so famous

Malebranche teaches that we see all things in God himself. This is certainly equivalent to explaining something unknown by something even more unknown. Moreover, according to him, we see not only all things in God, but God is also the sole activity therein, so that physical causes are so only apparently; they are merely occasional causes. ( Recherches de la vérité , Livre VI, seconde partie, chap. 3.) And so here we have essentially the pantheism of Spinoza who appears to have learned more from Malebranche than from Descartes.

Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

A hedge between keeps friendship green.

Newspapers are the second hand of history.

To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.

I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.