Arthur Schopenhauer — "The more perfect a thing is, the more it is subject to suffering."
The more perfect a thing is, the more it is subject to suffering.
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More from Arthur Schopenhauer
"Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast. We know it, if we look at the origin of society."
"The greatest happiness is to be born, and the least to die."
"The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs."
"Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control."
"The best thing in life is to be born an idiot."
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.