Arthur Schopenhauer — "The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing."
The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing.
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"The greatest possible value of life is zero."
"The pleasure of life is fleeting; the pain of life is lasting."
"No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose."
"The greatest happiness is to be born without the faculty of reason."
"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
German philosopher of pessimism whose The World as Will and Representation (1819) defined the suffering-and-renunciation tradition. Closely associated with Immanuel Kant (the system Schopenhauer built on and revised). For an intellectual contrast, see G.W.F. Hegel, German Idealist of the rational unfolding of Spirit — Schopenhauer scheduled his Berlin lectures opposite Hegel's and spent decades attacking Hegel's optimistic system as deliberately mystifying nonsense — the foundational rivalry of 19th-century German philosophy.
The standard scholarly entry points to Arthur Schopenhauer's work: Bryan Magee (Oxford, populariser-philosopher) — The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983); Christopher Janaway (Southampton, Schopenhauer specialist) — Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy (1989); David E. Cartwright (Wisconsin–Whitewater) — Schopenhauer: A Biography (2010). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Arthur Schopenhauer.
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