I leave you the best phrases of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a German philosopher whose philosophy started from the thought of Kant and Eastern philosophy: Buddhism and Vedanta, from which he takes his metaphysics, compassion and asceticism, central themes of his work.
Schopenhauer was born in Danzig, Poland, on February 22, 1788. His most influential book, The World as Will and Representation, argued that human action is driven by unsatisfied will and ultimately has no direction.
Schopenhauer was one of the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant principles of Eastern philosophy (eg, asceticism, the world as appearance). His writings on aesthetics, morals, and psychology would exert an important influence on thinkers and artists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
He was a devotee of Plato and Immanuel Kant, and a rival of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He died at his home in Frankfurt, Germany, on September 21, 1860.
Although his work did not garner much attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer has had a posthumous impact on various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science.
Some of the philosophers who have been most influenced by Schopenhauer include: Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Rank, Gustav Mahler, Joseph Campbell, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett, among others.
You may also be interested in these philosophy quotes.
Your most prominent quotes
-Each person carries the limits of his own field of vision to the limits of the world.
-It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it elsewhere.
-Most men are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and they are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
-The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
-The greatest of follies is sacrificing health for any other type of happiness.
-Only change is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
-Almost all of our pains arise from our relationships with other people.
-Happiness consists of the frequent repetition of pleasure.
-It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
-The young person must, early on, be able to bear being alone; as it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.
-My body and my will are one.
-He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
-Each person takes the limits of his own field of vision as the limits of the world.
-The best, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
-For our improvement we need a mirror.
-What people commonly call destiny is, as a rule, nothing more than their own stupid and foolish behavior.
-Feeling envy is human, but tasting the evil of others is perverse.
-All truth goes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently rejected. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-The genius and madness have something in common: they both live in a world that is different from the one that exists for everyone else.
-Men are by nature merely indifferent to each other; but women are enemies by nature.
-Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, the windows to the world; "Beacons," as the poet said, "erected in the sea of time."
-If a man wants to read good books, he must avoid bad ones; because life is short, and time and energy limited.
-We rarely think about what we have, while we do think about what we lack. For this, more than grateful, we are bitter.
-When you look back on your life, it seems like there is a plot, but when you are in it, it is a disaster: there is only one surprise after another. Later, you see that it was perfect.
-The talent reaches a goal that no one else can achieve; the genie reaches a goal that no one else can see.
-A man can only be himself while he is alone; if you don't love your solitude, you won't love your freedom, because only when you are alone are you really free.
-Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence there is a greater capacity for pain, and only with the highest degree of intelligence does suffering reach its highest point.
-The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use.
-Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of using your own.
-Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the majority; and if in the end he loses his patience, he crushes both: both them and himself.
-The truth is more beautiful naked.
-Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
-After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.
-Man is the only animal that causes pain to others for no other purpose than wanting to do so.
-All religions promise a reward beyond this life, in eternity, for the merits of the will or the heart, but no reward for the merits of the head, of the understanding.
- Compassion for animals is closely linked with goodness of character, and I confidently affirm that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
-The person who writes for fools is always sure of having a large audience.
-Religions are like fireflies. They need the dark to shine.
-Religion is the masterpiece of the art of training animals, because it trains people how they should think.
-Surely, a man can do what he wants to do; however, you cannot determine what you want.
-The effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, because these speak only of the shadow, while music speaks of the essence.
-If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe in him; because then he becomes bolder and more confident, lies harder, and is unmasked.
-The cause of the laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
-The smarter a man is, the less mysterious existence is for him.
-The life of each individual, really, is a tragedy; however, if you go through it in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
-Each day is a small life: each awakening and emergence is a small birth, each fresh morning is a small youth, each rest and dream a small death.
-Buying books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them.
-Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; The same goes for fame.
-There is something in us that is wiser than our head.
-Life without pain is meaningless.
-Everything that happens, happens out of necessity.
-The honor is not to be earned; it just shouldn't be lost.
-Living alone is the destiny of all great souls.
-Each nation ridicules other nations, and they are all right.
-The sense of humor is the only divine quality of man.
-A man who does not have enough originality to think of a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new content.
-Friends and acquaintances are the best passport to fortune.
-I am often surprised by the ability, and from time to time, by the stupidity of my dog; I have similar experiences with humanity.
-I believe that when death closes our eyes we will wake up to the light, of which our Sun is nothing more than the shadow.
-Compassion is the basis of morality.
-To overcome difficulties it is necessary to experience the complete delight of existence.
-Life is a constant process of agony.
-Music is the melody whose text is the world.
-Journalists are like dogs, when nothing moves they start barking.
-Faith is like love: it does not allow itself to be forced.
-The doctor sees all the weaknesses of humanity; the lawyer all the evil, the theologian all the stupidity.
-The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.
-The satisfaction consists in the absence of pain, which is the positive element of life.
-The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer, where all the dream characters also dream.
-The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty provide us with the commentary on it.
-Hatred is a matter of the heart; contempt is a matter of the head.
-Every genius is a great child; he looks at the world as something strange, like a spectacle, and therefore with a purely objective interest.
-If God created the world, I would not want to be that God, because the misery of the world would break my heart.
- Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
-Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The deepest of all the arts, it expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
-Authority and example run the world.
-The opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.
-A man can be himself only while alone.
-Just remember, once you're over the hill, you start picking up speed.
-The style is what gives value and circulation to thoughts.
-I have never known any problem that an hour of reading does not alleviate.
-In good health, everything is a source of pleasure; Without it, nothing, whatever it is, is pleasant. Health is the most important element in human happiness.
-The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are not, as a general rule and in principle, favorably received.
-Men need some kind of external activity, since they are inactive inside.
-It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our rational desires regarding possessions.
-Each generation, no matter how miserable of character, believes itself much wiser than the immediately preceding one, not to mention those that are further away.
-A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Who knows that he does not deserve a reproach, can treat him with contempt.
-A writer should never be brief, at the expense of being clear.
-Money is good in itself, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of a particular need; rather it is a satisfaction of everything.
-It is very easy to think what everyone thinks at this moment; However, to think what everyone will think in thirty years is not in the power of the majority.
-Waiting for a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry in his body everything that he has ever eaten.
-A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.
-Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, it is the foundation of what is serious and, consequently, the concentration of all desire.
-We have to put limits to our desires, stop our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can only achieve an infinitesimal part of everything worth having; and that, on the other hand, everyone incurs many of the ills of life.
-Descartes is, correctly, considered as the father of modern philosophy, because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet, by teaching men to use their brains, in the place that, previously, had occupied the Bible and Aristotle.
-Pleasure is never as pleasant as expected and pain is always more painful. Pain in the world always outweighs pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
-The presumption that animals have no rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral meaning, is a truly outrageous example of Western brutality and cruelty. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.