{"quotes":[{"text":"NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life.Preface to the second edition of 'the world as will and representation.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["philosophy","schopenhauer"],"id":12697,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"},{"text":"However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is to get well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some purely morbid and exaggerated ill-humor. No special effort to overcome their feelings is necessary, nor do such people require to be worked up in order to take the step; but as soon as the keeper into whose charge they are given leaves them for a couple of minutes, they quickly bring their life to an end.When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["arthur-schopenhauer","pessimism","schopenhauer","studies-in-pessimism","suicide"],"id":13192,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"},{"text":"A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["art-of-literature","hip","schopenhauer","writing"],"id":14611,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"},{"text":"The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.","author":"Irvin D. Yalom","tags":["philosophy","psychology","psychotherapy","schopenhauer"],"id":21897,"author_id":"Irvin+D.+Yalom"},{"text":"Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["free-will","schopenhauer","spinoza"],"id":28409,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"},{"text":"[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer's views of love are flawed. Love can't be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects of our nature.","author":"Tiffany Madison","tags":["challenge","essence","flaw","human","human-condition","human-nature","humanity","illusion","instinct","instincts","love","lover","mind","nature","overpower","power","procreation","redemption","schopenhauer","schopenhauer-as-educator","selfish","species","violence","violent"],"id":46130,"author_id":"Tiffany+Madison"},{"text":"And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffaceable.","author":"Guy de Maupassant","tags":["irony","sarcasm","schopenhauer","voltaire"],"id":78978,"author_id":"Guy+de+Maupassant"},{"text":"What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to the will, and thus also to the organism which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in the approximate same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["aphorism","maxims","schopenhauer"],"id":104032,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"},{"text":"Truth is most beautiful undraped.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["art-of-literature","schopenhauer","truth"],"id":118630,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"},{"text":"The most perfect and satisfactory knowledge is that of perception but this is limited to the absolutely particular, to the individual. The comprehension of the many and the various into *one* representation is possible only through the *concept*, in other words, by omitting the differences; consequently, the concept is a very imperfect way of representing things. The particular, of course, can also be apprehended immediately as a universal, namely when it is raised to the (Platonic) *Idea*; but in this process, which I have analysed in the third book, the intellect passes beyond the limits of individuality and therefore of time; moreover, this is only an exception.These inner and essential imperfections of the intellect are further increased by a disturbance to some extent external to it but yet inevitable, namely, the influence that the *will* exerts on all its operations, as soon as that will is in any way concerned in their result. Every passion, in fact every inclination or disinclination, tinges the objects of knowledge with its colour. Most common of occurrence is the falsification of knowledge brought about by desire and hope, since they show us the scarcely possible in dazzling colours as probable and well-nigh certain, and render us almost incapable of comprehending what is opposed to it. Fear acts in a similar way; every preconceived opinion, every partiality, and, as I have said, every interest, every emotion, and every predilection of the will act in an analogous manner.Finally, to all these imperfections of the intellect we must also add the fact that it grows old with the brain; in other words, like all physiological functions, it loses its energy in later years; in this way all its imperfections are then greatly increased.”—from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne in two volumes: volume II, pp. 139-141.","author":"Arthur Schopenhauer","tags":["epistemology","intellect","metaphysics","ontology","philosophy","schopenhauer","will"],"id":131358,"author_id":"Arthur+Schopenhauer"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":34,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}