Arthur Schopenhauer

Who was Arthur Schopenhauer?

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher best known for his book, The World as Will and Representation, in which he claimed that our world is driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, he maintained that the "truth was recognized by the sages of India"; consequently, his solutions to suffering were similar to those of Vedantic and Buddhist thinkers. His faith in "transcendental ideality" led him to accept atheism.

At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. He has influenced many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Otto Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.

Famous Quotes:

• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
• Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
• The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.
• How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
• Fame is something that must be won. Honor is something that must not be lost.
• Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
• Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
• It is with trifles and when he is off guard that a man best reveals his character.
• Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
• The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.