Quotes About Schopenhauer

Music is so easy to explain, yet so inexplicable, as it reproduces all the emotions of our inner being without reality, remote from pain.

Belief is like love: it cannot be compelled; and as any attempt to compel love produces hate, so it is the attempt to compel belief which first produces real unbelief.

If this world were populated with really thinking beings, it would be impossible for all kinds of noise to be permitted and given such unlimited scope, even the most terrible and purposeless. But if nature had intended man for thinking, she would not have given him ears, or at any rate would have furnished them with air-tight flaps, as with bats whom for this reason I envy.

Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in 1813

Apesar de haver muitas vezes dialogado com o velho Platão e com o seu conterrâneo e predecessor na linhagem dos grandes filósofos alemães, Immanuel Kant, foi na sabedoria oriental que Arthur Schopenhauer encontrou sua fonte eterna – mais precisamente nos Vedas hindus, e no Bhagavad Gita, o ápice de toda a sua filosofia.

In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence. ?from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171

Gdyby?my przyj?li wolno?? woli, to ka?da ludzka czynno?? by?aby cudem nienadaj?cym si? wyt?umaczy?: skutkiem bez przyczyny.

Thus music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is

La volontà, come cosa in sé, differisce completamente dalla sua manifestazione fenomenica ed è assolutamente indipendente dalle forme di quest'ultima, che essa assimila solo quando si manifesta, e che quindi concernono solo la sua estrinsecazione obiettiva, ma sono estranee alla volontà stessa.

Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step in asceticism or the denial of the will-to-live.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing – mind or world – may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant.

From the austere negations of the ancient Indian materialists, to the funereal perambulations of Schopenhauer, pessimism also has its own ontological argument: existence is that beyond which nothing worse can be conceived.

One senses that for Schopenhauer, the world does exist, and it's horrible, and there's not much one can do about it.

It is for this reason that we find that co-existence, which could neither be intime alone, for time has no contiguity, nor in space alone, forspace has no before, after, or now,

Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, The highest law is love, the love that is compassion

Schopenhauer's... vitriolic contempt for the 'professors of philosophy'. Independently wealthy, Schopenhauer scorned those who lived 'from' rather than 'for' philosophy: since he who pays the piper calls the tune, independence of thought, he held, requires independence of means.

Mindful of Schopenhauer's Buddhist affinities, one might venture a summary of the four-booked World as Will and Representation by means of four 'noble truths': the world is my representation; its essence is will, that is to say, suffering; temporary release from suffering is possible through art; permanent release is possible through 'denial of the will', that is to say, death.

Afortunadamente, como aprendimos de Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard y Nietzsche, esta contradicción y este conflicto son una señal más de que la lógica y la razón son impotentes.

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're

When Schiller lived, the time for dealing with that nether world had not yet come. Nietzsche at heart was much nearer to it; to him it was certain that we were approaching an epoch of unprecedented struggle. He it was, the only true pupil of Schopenhauer, who tore through the veil of naïveté and in his Zarathustra conjured up from the nether region ideas that were destined to be the most vital content of the coming age.