Top 100 Quotes About Schopenhauer
#1. That when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
Arthur Schopenhauer
#2. Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I'd love to be able to eat with my eyes - I'm
Irvin D. Yalom
#3. Schopenhauer had been Hitler's philosophical god in the early days. In power it was Nietzsche.
Ernst Hanfstaengl
#4. Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.
Roger Scruton
#5. Me and Schopenhauer. Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.
Philip Kerr
#6. The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you're a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
Joseph Campbell
#7. Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.
Gilles Deleuze
#8. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
Jorge Luis Borges
#9. In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Philip Kitcher
#10. Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.
Michael LaRocca
#11. Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Ray Kurzweil
#12. And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower, But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes from Schopenhauer . Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth, And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth.
James Branch Cabell
#13. Schopenhauer was right: Life has to be about disillusionment stumbling inexorably towards the totally fucked.
Irvine Welsh
#14. I agree with Schopenhauer that one of the most powerful motives that attracts people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life.
Albert Einstein
#15. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, "Writers should use common words to say uncommon things." When
Mary Embree
#16. Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)
Philip Kitcher
#17. Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection. - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, German philosopher
Bernd Heinrich
#18. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain De Botton
#19. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.
Alain De Botton
#20. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my
Albert Einstein
#21. Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.
Philip Kitcher
#22. Schopenhauer once said: the life of one dog may be worth more than the lives of many human beings.
Luis E. Navia
#23. Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.
Georg Brandes
#24. I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
#25. Schopenhauer noted, are unmistakable signs that one has made peace with the world and that one is willing to perpetuate the social order.71
Luis E. Navia
#26. Even a genius like Schopenhauer was crushed by unemployment," he wrote. "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving."30 Eduard
Walter Isaacson
#27. If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.
Ned Beauman
#28. If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
Stephen Fry
#29. Arthur Schopenhauer: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident
Anonymous
#30. Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe's principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors
Thomas Ligotti
#31. The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.
Alain De Botton
#32. Schopenhauer writes about marriage. He says getting married is like grasping blind into a sack of snakes and hoping to find an eel.
Laura Moriarty
#33. As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, 'It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.
Andy Miller
#34. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.
Viktor E. Frankl
#35. Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.
P.G. Wodehouse
#36. The egoist feels lonely, surrounded by threatening and alien events; all his desires are sunk in his own concerns. A kind person lives in a world of beneficent events, whose goodness matches his own. - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Leo Tolstoy
#37. People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.
Thomas Bernhard
#38. Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,
Bohumil Hrabal
#39. The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present.
Philip Kitcher
#40. Schopenhauer said only men had the total objectivity necessary for genius, and that you only had to look at a woman's shape to see that she wasn't intended for much mental or physical work.
Jacky Fleming
#41. The golden apples drop from the same tree, whether they be gathered by an imbecile locksmith's apprentice or by a Schopenhauer.
C. G. Jung
#42. Intellectualism - the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends - fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.
Will Durant
#43. Schopenhauer has a metaphor for human closeness. He writes about cold porcupines who have to snuggle up to keep warm, but if they snuggle too close they stab each other with their quills. A crowd of porcupines is constantly, uncomfortably assessing the safety of proximity.
Brenda Walker
#44. Everything is entirely in Nature, and Nature is entire in everything. She has her center in every brute. - SCHOPENHAUER The
Joyce Carol Oates
#45. Once munching has begun, Schopenhauer held, the human will cannot resist further munching, and the result is a universe with crumbs over everything.
Woody Allen
#46. In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable.
Magda Szabo
#47. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it
Oscar Wilde
#48. The eternal being ... , as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#50. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#51. A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#52. Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#53. What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#54. Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#55. To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#57. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#58. The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#60. Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude
Arthur Schopenhauer
#61. Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#62. Time is merely the spread-out and piecemeal view that an individual being has of the Ideas.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#64. Every parting is a foretaste of death, and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#66. The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#67. Dialectic is the art of intellectual fencing; and it is only when we so regard it that we can erect it into a branch of knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#68. Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#69. There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
Arthur Schopenhauer
#70. Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#72. Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#73. If we are distracted and read thoughtlessly, and then realize that we have indeed taken in all the words, but no concepts.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#74. The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech ... As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere ... When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#75. I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#76. It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#77. The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#78. All religions promise a reward beyond this life in eternity for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head, of the understanding.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#79. We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#80. Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to
procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#83. For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#84. I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#85. It is for this
reason that we find that co-existence, which could neither be in
time alone, for time has no contiguity, nor in space alone, for
space has no before, after, or now,
Arthur Schopenhauer
#86. Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#88. As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies
Arthur Schopenhauer
#89. Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#91. It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#94. Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#96. I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#97. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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