Arthur Schopenhauer — "The world is a bad joke."
The world is a bad joke.
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More from Arthur Schopenhauer
"The general mistake is to suppose that we shall do something great in the future."
"One need only look at a woman's shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work. Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our ea…"
"Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection."
"Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing."
"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."
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.