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Happiness
Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosophy’s Dr Feelgood
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the author of The World as Will and Representation, was a profound metaphysician who also advocated basing ethics upon compassion. He was a great philosopher, but notoriously pessimistic, as the following quotations might suggest.
“It is then well said that life should be, from one end to the other, only a lesson; to which, however, anyone might reply: ‘For this very reason I wish I had been left in the peace of the all-sufficient nothing, where I would have had no need of lessons or of anything else’.”
“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”
“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.”
“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”
“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
“To be alone is the fate of all great minds – a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”
“For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?”
“Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.”
