Reading is thinking with someone else’s head instead of ones own.

The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream...

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

Nul ne peut voir par-dessus soi, écrit Schopenhauer pour faire comprendre l’impossibilité d’un échange d’idées entre deux individus d’un niveau intellectuel trop différent.

However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and...

[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer’s views of love are flawed. Love can’t be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish...

It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case...

If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.

…there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those...

Truth is most beautiful undraped.

The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man’s actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no...

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted...

He was the only authentic German. You might like him. Being a police officer, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the need to put an end to the lives of the perverse when sex crimes go too...

NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late...

Acel gest simbolic de a o întrona pe Déesse Raison la Notre-Dame pare să fi însemnat pentru lumea apuseană ceva asemănător cu tăierea Stejarilor lui Wotan de către misionarii creştini, căci nici atunci, nici acum,...

There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it...

The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly,...

They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice… That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable...

When it comes to Schopenhauer, I think I need a To-Go box.

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author’s thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which...

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today...

Let us see rather that like Janus—or better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of death—religion has two faces, one very friendly, one very gloomy…

Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.