Parerga and Paralipomena Quotes

“Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1

“If this world were populated with really thinking beings, it would be impossible
for all kinds of noise to be permitted and given such unlimited scope, even
the most terrible and purposeless. But if nature had intended man for thinking,
she would not have given him ears, or at any rate would have furnished them
with air-tight flaps, as with bats whom for this reason I envy.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)

“The latter had assumed the reality of the external world on the credit of God; and here, of course, it seems strange that, whereas the other theistic philosophers endeavour to demonstrate the existence of God from that of the world, Descartes, on the contrary, proves the existence of the world first from the existence and trustworthiness of God; it is the cosmological proof the other way round. Here too Malebranche goes a step farther and teaches that we see all things immediately in God himself. This certainly is equivalent to explaining something unknown by something even more unknown.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1

“[Descartes] And so it was he who discovered the gulf between the subjective or ideal and the objective or real. He clothed this insight in the form of a doubt concerning the existence of the external world; but by his inadequate solution of such doubt, namely that God Almighty would surely not deceive us, he has shown how profound the problem is and how difficult it is to solve.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1

“There is no literary quality, such as for instance power of persuasion, wealth of imagery, gift of comparison, boldness or bitterness or brevity or grace or facility of expression, no wit, striking contrasts, curtness, naïveté, and so on, which we can acquire by reading authors who have such qualities. But in this way we can bring about such qualities in ourselves, in the event of our already possessing them as a tendency or inclination and thus ”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1