ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER


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Arthur Schopenhauer

The cheapest form of pride however is national pride. For it reveals in the one thus afflicted the lack of individual qualities of which he could be proud, while he would not otherwise reach for what he shares with so many millions. He who possesses significant personal merits will rather recognize the defects of his own nation, as he has them constantly before his eyes, most clearly. But that poor blighter who has nothing in the world of which he can be proud, latches onto the last means of being proud, the nation to which he belongs to. Thus he recovers and is now in gratitude ready to defend with hands and feet all errors and follies which are its own.
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Arthur Schopenhauer

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
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Arthur Schopenhauer

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
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Arthur Schopenhauer

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
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Arthur Schopenhauer

Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognizes nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorized it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.
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This quotation reflects the Spinoza view that the individual is supreme in determining truth.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
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This is one of the best distinctions between talent and genius ever given.

Arthur Schopenhauer

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
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Arthur Schopenhauer

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.
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Arthur Schopenhauer

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
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Arthur Schopenhauer

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
© Schäfer, Johann
Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Born: February 22, 1788
  • Died: September 21, 1860
  • Nationality: German
  • Profession: Philosopher
Biography

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.

Related Authors
Meister Eckhart, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Martin Buber