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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.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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Philosophy

More quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Schopenhauer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.