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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.

— 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.