Arthur Schopenhauer — "The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it."
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
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More from Arthur Schopenhauer
"Every genius is a great child."
"The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom."
"The world is a spectacle for the gods."
"If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him."
"The state is merely a large-scale institution for the prevention of crime, and as such is a necessary evil."
About Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
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.