24 quotes
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that distinguishes the philosopher.
For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
A man becomes a philosopher by reason of a certain perplexity, from which he seeks to free himself.
How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity!
Parerga und paralipomena (1851)
Our susceptibility to pain is wellnigh infinite; but that to pleasure has narrow limits.
To the hope of immortality of the soul there is always added that of a “better world”; an indication that the present world is not worth much.
In philosophy at the universities truth occupies only a secondary place and, if called upon, she must get up and make room for another attribute.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Philosophy of religion … really amounts to … philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
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?
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
The World as Will and Representation (1819)
Optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.
To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy.
Great sufferings render lesser ones quite incapable of being felt, and conversely, in the absence of great sufferings even the smallest vexations and annoyances torment us, and put us in a bad mood.
The woman's share in procreation is more guiltless than the man's; for he bestows upon the child its will, which is the first sin, and therefore the root of all evil; the woman, on the contrary, bestows its intellect, which is the pathway to redemption.
The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
the teaching of my philosophy... that our whole existence is something which had better not have been, and that to disown and disclaim it is the highest wisdom.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, “to kill time,” in other words, to escape from boredom.
States of human happiness often resemble certain groups of trees which look very beautiful when seen from a distance; but, if we go up to them and walk among the trees, that beauty vanishes. We do not know where it was and are standing between trees. This is the reason why we so often envy the position of others.
We can also regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. At all events even the man who has fared tolerably well, becomes more clearly aware, the longer he lives, that life on the whole is a disappointment, nay a cheat, in other words, bears the character of a great mystification or even a fraud.
That exceedingly strong tendency of all animals and human beings to maintain life and continue it as long as possible . . . is by no means the result of any objective knowledge of the value of life, but is independent of all knowledge; or, in other words, that those beings exhibit themselves not as drawn from the front, but as driven from behind.