One is intelligent the more unfortunate as one is.
arthur Schopenhauerquotes
1788 - 1860
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), called the “pessimistic philosopher,” significantly influenced existential philosophy and modern psychology with his writings rooted in the philosophies of Plato and Immanuel Kant.
Born to wealthy German parents in Poland, Schopenhauer was raised to take over his father’s merchant business. When his father died, the lure of scholarly pursuits was too strong for Schopenhauer to ignore, and he left his business apprenticeship for the University of Gottingen to study natural sciences and philosophy.
After earning his doctorate of philosophy from the University of Jena with his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, he began a career as professor at the University of Berlin. There, his rivalry with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel began and it endured through their lives.
During this time, he published his most famous work, The World as Will and Idea, which established him as a foremost philosopher. In it, Schopenhauer discusses the self-centeredness of mankind and the aimlessness of human direction. Influenced also by Hindu mysticism and Buddhism, Schopenhauer reflected that desire was the root of pain and suffering.
Fearing the cholera epidemic in Berlin, Schopenhauer renounced his professorship and moved to Frankfurt where he lived as a recluse for the next 28 years before his death. He kept the company of poodles and cats, maintained a lasting friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and continued to clarify and affirm the original philosophical system laid out in The World as Will and Idea with multiple new editions.
Life is known to be a process of combustion; intellect is the light produced by this process.
combustion / intellect / Life / light / process
And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
For to kill a man in a fair fight, is to prove that you are superior to him in strength or skill; and to justify the deed, you must assume that the right of the stronger is really a right.
In the first place, no man is happy but strives his whole life long after a supposed happiness which he seldom attains, and even if he does it is only to be disappointed with it.
disappointed / Happiness / Life / man
The greatest wisdom consists in enjoying the present and making this enjoyment the goal of life, because the present is all that is real and everything else merely imaginary. But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.
That the Negroes were enslaved more than other races, and on a large scale, is evidently a result of their being, in contrast to other races, inferior in intelligence – which, however, does not justify such slavery.
We take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something.
The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying.
For we find even the excellent Descartes, who gave the first impulse to subjective reflection and thereby became the father of modern philosophy, still entangled in confusions for which it is difficult to account ; and we shall soon see to what serious and deplorable consequences these confusions have led with regard to Metaphysics.
confusions / Descartes / metaphysics / philosophy / subjective