Arthur Schopenhauer
Philosopher
1788-02-22 – 1860-09-21
German philosopher known for his influential work on pessimism, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. His major work The World as Will and Representation shaped later thinkers in philosophy, psychology, and literature. He remains a key figure in 19th-century European intellectual history.
Books by Arthur Schopenhauer
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Philosophical Writings: Arthur Schopenhauer
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The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy
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The Wisdom of Life
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Quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer
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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
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Every society requires mutual accommodation and mutually agreeable temper; hence the larger it is, the duller.
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There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy
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There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic.
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Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties
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Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.
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That the Negroes were enslaved more than other races, and on a large scale, is evidently a result of their being, in contrast to other races, inferior in intelligence - which, however, does not justify such slavery
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There is an underlying unity in all things
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I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.
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One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
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... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
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This consists in not taking a book into one's hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time — such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind
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Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.
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On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.
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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.
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To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself.
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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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The art of not reading is a very important one. [. . .] [Y]ou should remember that he who writes for fools always find a large public. – A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: For life is short.
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Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
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Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
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