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For Schopenhauer, like his great predecessor Immanuel Kant, there is a fundamental distinction between the world as it appears (phenomena) and the world as it truly is (noumena).
Will is seen as the source of all suffering, since willing never brings contentment, but only further desire! (An
“All writing is useless that does not contain a stimulus to activity.”
“No entirely radical truth is possible (in academic life).”
“We moderns have no culture to call our own. We fill ourselves with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias.”
The point is to assimilate the past, to use it in the making of our own life and culture.
Education insists on accurate detail and detached “objectivity” which serve only to paralyze the individual’s project of self-realization and action in the world.
“I will never again read an author of whom I suspect that he wanted to make a book, but only those whose thoughts unexpectedly became a book.”
“When his book opens its mouth, the author must shut his.”
“A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.”
“Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.”
“If it is your destiny to think, give to it divine honours, and sacrifice to it the best you have and what you love the most.”
Eternal Recurrence stresses the significance of our present actions: whatever we do now will return to us, again and again. It underlines the fact of our personal responsibility for those actions, and implies an exhortation: strive to be greater than you are, to overcome yourself; the present moment is all, so let us make the best use of it and of ourselves.
“There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena …”
Any truth which threatens life is no truth at all. It is an error.
Too much information causes indigestion of the spirit.
“There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena
