Schopenhauer as Educator Quotes

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. Let him follow his conscience, which calls out to him: “Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“Everything that can be denied, deserves to be denied; and real sincerity means the belief in a state of things which cannot be denied, or in which there is no lie. The sincere man feels that his activity has a metaphysical meaning. It can only be explained by the laws of a different and a higher life; it is in the deepest sense an affirmation: even if everything that he does seem utterly opposed to the laws of our present life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“Most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“...love of truth is something fearsome and mighty.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“How can we “find ourselves” again? How can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled. If the hare has seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven skins, and not be able to say: “Here you truly are; there is skin no more.”

Also this digging into oneself, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. You may easily take such hurt, that no doctor can heal you. And what is the point: since everything bears witness to our essence — our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke- and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth? [...]

Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this—and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroy stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“...nothing stands so much in the way of the production and propagation of the great philosopher by nature as does the bad philosopher who works for the state.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“ويواجه المرء في كل مكان الحاجة إلى قلائد كلمات رنانة جديدة يعلقها في الحياة بحيث يمكن أن تمنحها نفحة إحتفالية صاخبة . الجميع يعرف هذا الوضع الغريب ، الذي تضغط فيه الذكريات المكدرة فجأة ، و كيف نبذل جهوداً كبيرة عن طريق الصخب و الإيماءات لطردها من عقولنا ؛ لكن صخب و ايماءات الحياة العادية تكشف أننا جميعاً نجد أنفسنا باستمرار في مثل هذا الوضع ، و أننا نعيش في خوف من الذكرى و من الإحساس الداخلي. لكن ماهذا الذي يقلقنا مراراً ، أيّ بعوض هذا الذي يمنعنا من النوم ؟ ثمة أرواح تحيط بنا ، كل لحظة من الحياة تريد أن تقول لنا شيئاً ، لكننا لا نريد الإصغاء أصوات الروح. عندما نكون وحيدين و هادئين نصبحح خائفين من أنّ شيئاً ما سيُهمس في آذننا، و لذا نكره السكينة و نخدّر أنفسفنا بالصحبة.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“To cling to life, blindly and madly, with no other aim, to be ignorant of the reason, or even the fact, of one's punishment, nay, to thirst after it as if it were a pleasure, with all the perverted desire of a fool—this is what it means to be an animal. If universal nature leads up to man, it is to show us that he is necessary to redeem her from the curse of the beast's life, and that in him existence can find a mirror of itself wherein life appears, no longer blind, but in its real metaphysical significance. But we should consider where the beast ends and the man begins—the man, the one concern of Nature. As long as any one desires life as a pleasure in itself, he has not raised his eyes above the horizon of the beast; he only desires more consciously what the beast seeks by a blind impulse. It is so with us all, for the greater part of our lives. We do not shake off the beast, but are beasts ourselves, suffering we know not what.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“The occupation with scholarship, when it is not guided and limited by any higher educational maxim, but instead is increasingly unfettered, adhering to the principle “the more the better,” is certainly just as pernicious for the scholar as the economic doctrine of laissez-faire is for the morality of entire nations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“For Nature needs the artist, as she needs
the philosopher, for a metaphysical end, the
explanation of herself, whereby she may have a clear and sharp picture of what she only saw dimly in the troubled period of transition, — and so may reach self-consciousness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“As long as this imitation-thinking continues to be recognised by the state, the lasting effect of a true philosophy will be destroyed, or at any rate circumscribed; nothing does this so well as the curse of ridicule that the representatives of the great cause have drawn on them, for it attacks that cause itself. And so I think it will encourage culture to deprive philosophy of its political and academic standing, and relieve state and university of the task, impossible for them, of deciding between true and false philosophy. Let the philosophers run wild, forbid them any thoughts of office or civic position, hold them out no more bribes,—nay, rather persecute them and treat them ill,—you will see a wonderful result. They will flee in terror and seek a roof where they can, these poor phantasms; one will become a parson, another a schoolmaster, another will creep into an editorship, another write school-books for young ladies' colleges, the wisest of them will plough the fields, the vainest go to court. Everything will be left suddenly empty, the birds flown: for it is easy to get rid of bad philosophers,—one only has to cease paying them. And that is a better plan than the open patronage of any philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“We like to consider the great man as the noble child of his age, who feels its defects more strongly and intimately than the smaller men: and therefore the struggle of the great man against his age is apparently nothing but a mad fight to the death with himself. Only apparently, however: he only fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity. And so, at bottom, he is only an enemy to that element which is not truly himself, the irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and eternal in him.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“To je tako malograđanski, obavezati se na poglede, koji stotina milja dalje već ne obavezuju. Ja hoću da učinim pokušaj, da dođem do slobode, kaže sebi mlada duša; i tu bi trebalo da je spreči to, da se slučajno dve nacije mrze i ratuju, ili da se more nalazi između dva kopna, ili da se u njenom okruženju podučava neka religija, koja ipak nije postojala pre nekoliko hiljada godina.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“Yet let us reflect, where does the animal cease, where does man begin? — man, who is nature’s sole concern! As long as anyone desires life as he desires happiness, he has not yet raised his eyes above the horizon of the animal, for he only desires more consciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse. But that is what we all do for the greater part of our lives; usually we fail to emerge out of animality, we ourselves are the animals whose suffering seems to be senseless.
But there are moments when we realize this: then the clouds are rent asunder, and we see that, in common with all nature, we are pressing towards something that stands high above us. In this sudden illumination we gaze around us and behind us with a shudder; we behold the more subtle beasts of prey and there we are in the midst of them. The tremendous coming and going of men on the great wilderness of the earth, their founding of cities and states their wars their restless assembling and scattering again, their confused mingling, mutual imitation, mutual outwitting and downtreading, their wailing in distress, their howls of joy in victory — all this is a continuation of animality; as though man was to be deliberately retrogressed and defrauded of his metaphysical disposition, indeed as though nature, after having desired and worked at man for so long, now drew back from him in fear and preferred to return to the unconsciousness of instinct. Nature needs knowledge and it is terrified of the knowledge it has need of; and so the flame flickers restlessly back and forth as though afraid of itself and seizes upon a thousand things before it seizes upon that on account of which nature needs knowledge at all. In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give our heart to the state, to money-making, to sociability or science merely so as no longer to possess it ourselves, how we labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself; universal too is the shy concealment of this haste because everyone wants to seem content and would like to deceive more sharp-eyed observers as to the wretchedness he feels; and also universal is the need for new tinkling word-bells to hang upon life and so bestow upon it an air of noisy festivity. Everyone is familiar with the strange condition in which unpleasant memories suddenly assert themselves and we then make great efforts, through vehement noise and gestures, to banish them from our minds: but the noise and gestures which are going on everywhere reveal that we are all in such a condition all the time, that we live in fear of memory and of turning inward. But what is it that assails us so frequently, what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? There are spirits all around us, every moment of our life wants to say something to us, but we refuse to listen to these spirit-voices. We are afraid that when we are alone and quiet something will be whispered into our ear, and so we hate quietness and deafen ourselves with sociability.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“The man who only regards his life as a moment in the evolution of a race or a state or a science, and will belong merely to a history of "becoming," has not understood the lesson of existence, and must learn it over again.

This eternal "becoming something" is a lying puppet-show, in which man has forgot himself; it is the force that scatters individuality to the four winds, the eternal childish game that the big baby time is playing in front of us—and with us.

The heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be the plaything of time.

Everything in the process of "becoming" is a hollow sham, contemptible and shallow: man can only find the solution of his riddle in "being" something definite and unchangeable.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“Philosophy offers an asylum to mankind where no tyranny can penetrate.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator