"Schopenhauer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche—and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle—though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sixty-five. The figures vary in different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all. These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure of exceptional unhappiness, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the most dreadful lessons in philosophy—all of Schopenhauer for tomorrow. The professor doesn't seem to realize that we are taking any other subject. He's a queer old duck; he goes about with his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when occasionally he strikes solid ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... quite right. The men can't spare from gambling the time to read, so it is only the society women who buy books and pass judgment on them. It is to The Lady, as Schopenhauer called her, to the little goose, as I should characterize her, that we are indebted for these shoals of lukewarm and mucilaginous ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... philosophic training is," he observed. "Culture does a great deal. It makes us more modest, for one thing. I don't suppose you know, for instance, that you are setting up an opinion of your own in opposition to such men as Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer maintained that as the man of genius gave his whole life for the profit of humanity, he had a license of conduct which was not accorded to the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Schopenhauer's advice to ignore fools and knaves and not to speak to them, as the best method of keeping them at a distance, does not seem drastic enough in these days of the modern newspaper-reporter nuisance. One may throw them ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... "I smell garlic!" The use of rope in Alpine climbing. "Shake hands." A pupil of Schopenhauer. At the hut on the Grands-Mulets. "Tartarin, I ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... was a type of man that Armour had never met. Morris was a Jew, a Bavarian, who affected music, art and philosophy. Nelson Morris, small, smooth of face, humming bars from Bach and quoting Schopenhauer, buying hogs at the Chicago Stockyards and then killing these hogs for the gastronomical delectation of Christians, was a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... and invites him to fancy how fine a figure he would cut in more picturesque circumstances than his own. When it simplifies great events, as Stevenson said it must, it produces the feeling of power; and when it dignifies the commonplace, as Schopenhauer said it ought to, it produces the sense of importance. People like to imagine themselves playing on a large stage. The most humdrum of men would be pleased to act a hero's part, if it could be done without risk or effort; ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... perfectly harassing to have one's tragedy taken for light comedy. You know my wedded life was unhappy. The late baronet was absolutely ignorant of Schopenhauer, and even cursed him to my face for a madman, just because he happened to be my favourite philosopher. Since I've dipped into Hegel, I've come largely to agree with my husband's denunciation, though not on the same grounds. Not that I profess to know anything either about Hegel or Schopenhauer. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... glimpse of Lucy Woodrow next day, Tuesday. She was certainly avoiding him. The conviction made him bitter. How well Schopenhauer knew these women! Lucy's squeamishness was further proof of a narrow and commonplace mind. Had he suffered so much all his life at the hands of people of this class, and learned to measure them so well and hate them so sincerely, only ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... very much of the impulsion that makes us work and strive, attack and solve problems has an element of anger at its root. Life is a battle and for every real conquest man has had to summate and focus all his energies, so that anger is the acme of the manifestation of Schopenhauer's will to live, achieve and excel. Hiram Stanley rather absurdly described it as an epoch when primitive man first became angry and fought, overcoming the great quaternary carnivora and made himself the lord of creation. Plato said anger was the basis of the state, Ribot made it the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... but the idea of the thing evokes the idea. Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life alone makes the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the brief span of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years in sorrow. Time itself, let alone Eternity, is all but excruciating to Doubt. And many besides Schopenhauer have secretly regarded consciousness as the hideous mistake and malady of Nature. Therefore we must not only have quantity of years, to speak in the language of the present, but quality of correspondence. When we leave Science behind, this correspondence also receives a higher ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... declaration—that the universe is God, and that God is the totality of being. Now, try as we will, such a conception can never take the place of the thought of God as our Father, and that for the simple reason that the universe is not even what we mean by personal. As Schopenhauer shrewdly remarked, "To call the universe 'God' is not to explain it, but merely to burden language with a superfluous synonym for the word 'universe.' Whether one says 'the universe is God' or 'the universe is the universe' makes no difference." It is when people no longer know ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... are the appearance of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Wagner; standing on their shoulders we look far into the distance. The fifth and sixth centuries ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Schopenhauer, "the world is barren, dull, and superficial; to another, rich, interesting, and full of meaning." If one loves beauty and looks for it, he will see it wherever he goes. If there is music in his soul, he will hear it everywhere; every object in nature will sing to him. Two ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... golden age of Rosa Bonheur's "The Horse Fair," he was expounding the principles of the post-impressionists. In the midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for Richard Strauss. Before the rev. professors had come to Schopenhauer, or even to Spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No stranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he has brought in his baggage. No man among us has ever urged more ardently, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... quotes his authorities. Buddha, whom the Catholic Church converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the deity), on account of the mystery of the cruelty of things. Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbes model pessimist, who at the humblest distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found the vision of mans unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent, heartless, cowardly, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... a valuable merit (as I think Schopenhauer has discovered) in people who have no other, and the appearance of it is extremely useful to those who have, but I am not suggesting that Vaughan was not human, and there was, no doubt, many a moment when he smiled to himself, and felt that ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... every emotion has an outward manifestation. Because people think, feel, and act, they leave marks of these in bodily lines and habits. Not only is the face a bulletin board, but as Schopenhauer says, "One's life may be his autobiography." One's life may even be ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy, though in an advanced social order this sentiment approves itself to the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... any other faith, is founded on four axioms, which are called "the four excellent truths." The first and fundamental one is: "Pain is inseparable from existence." This is the principle of all pessimism, ancient and modern. Schopenhauer, an out-and-out pessimist, lays down the allied maxim, "All pleasure is negative, that is, it consists in getting rid of a want or pain,"[13-1] a principle expressed before his time in the saying "the highest pleasure is the relief ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Three vols. 8vo, 1880 (Remington). It was noticed at some length in the Athenoeum of June 12th, in which the author's philosophic outlook is condemned as a dangerous compound of Schopenhauer, Comte, and Shelley. It is somewhat doubtful if he ever made more for a book than the L250 he got for New Grub Street. L200, we believe, was advanced on The Nether World, but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from the publisher's point of view, and L150 was refused for ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious, yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... very nature of its eternal essence, could not say it was good? It is so grave a matter that one wonders Helvetius did not betray it, as he did that other secret about which the philosophers had agreed to keep mum, so that Herr Schopenhauer could write about it as he did about that other. Herr Schopenhauer certainly had the courage to speak with philosophical asperity of the gentle sex. It may be because he was never married. And then his mother wrote novels! I have been ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Pallanton had married on a new, radical basis. They had first met in the house of an intellectual woman, the wife of a university professor, where clever young persons were drawn in and taught to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Ibsen and George Moore, and to engage gracefully in perilous topics. They had been rather conscious that they were radicals,—"did their own thinking," as they phrased it, these young persons. They were not willing to accept the current morality, not even that part of it engraved ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... philosophic insight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis optimism and pessimism are subjective—the expression of temperament or individual experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there is any particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to him at first hand and not through books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On this theme no American poet has written more beautifully and with a keener sympathy ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... have had men return to a state of nature that they might be freed from shams and conventionalities, did not see that the sacrifice of reality to appearances was quite as bad for women. Mary Wollstonecraft, farther-sighted than he, discovered at once the flaw in his reasoning. What was said of Schopenhauer by a Frenchman could with equal truth be said of her: "Ce n'est pas un philosophe comme les autres, c'est un philosophe qui a vu le monde." She had lived in woman's world, and consequently, unlike the sentimentalists who were accepted authorities on the subject, she did not reason ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... belonged, of the pleasant hours he would spend in discussing with youthful shallowness the deepest subjects that can occupy the human mind, deciding, between a draft of brown ale and a whiff of tobacco, that Schopenhauer was right in one point, and that Kant was wrong in another. But, for the present, at least, none of those things could by mere anticipation distract his thoughts from the matter ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... true, that "a wise man's meditation is not of death but of life," then Andreyev is surely not a wise man. Some philosophers might have written their works even without a guarantee against immortality, though Schopenhauer, who exercised a influence on the young Andreyev, was of the opinion that "without death there would hardly be any philosophy"; but of Andreyev it is certain that the bulk of his works would not have been written, and could not be what they are, were it not for the fact of death. If there ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... to France and translated it into French and Latin. Publishing only the Latin text. Despite the distortions which must have resulted from transmission through two alien languages, the light of the thought still shone with such brightness that it drew from Schopenhauer the fervent words: "How entirely does the Oupnekhat (Upanishad) breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one, who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... tells us there is a primary tendency in man 'to transfer the sense of his own nature, in the radical explanation of all phenomena whatever.' Writing in the same key, Schopenhauer calls man 'a metaphysical animal.' He is speaking of the need man feels of a theory, in regard to the riddle of existence, which forces itself upon his notice; 'a need arising from the consciousness that behind the physical in the world, there is a metaphysical something permanent ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... obsolete notion of Schopenhauer's were true after all,—that love is a blind instinct which looks no whit toward the welfare of the man and woman it dominates, but only to the equipment a child born of them would inherit? What if, after all, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... more that a man's vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's? A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it. In the recent ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... advances. The fact had been recognised in remote ages long before theories of evolution had taken their modern form. Pessimism, from the time of the ancient Hindoo philosophers to the time of their disciple, Schopenhauer, has been in no want of evidence to support its melancholy conclusions. It would be idle to waste rhetoric in the attempt to recapitulate so familiar a position. Though I am not a pessimist, I cannot doubt that there is more plausibility in the doctrine than I could wish. Moreover, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... he said, "is condemned by the Church, as well as by the teachings of Schopenhauer and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Those philosophers, like Schopenhauer, who advocate the legalizing of polygyny in civilized countries, are hardly worth replying to. It is safe to say that any widespread practice of polygyny in civilized communities would lead to a reversion to the moral standards of ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... d'Angleterre, or Englischer Hof, in the centre of the city, the Rossmarkt, is a fine old hotel. Our present king, when Prince of Wales, generally stayed there when passing through. The famous German philosopher, Schopenhauer, dined there regularly for thirty years—from 1831 to 1860, though I cannot advance that as any great recommendation, for the ways and tastes of philosophers are usually somewhat erratic. I have no doubt, however, that the cuisine has materially ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... philosophy insist that art is something more than a vehicle for the mere sense of the beautiful, an exquisite provocation wherewith to startle the sense of a selfish, epicurean pleasure; that its highest function—to follow the idea of the Greek Plato, and the greatest of his modern disciples, Schopenhauer—is to serve as the incarnation of the true and the good; and, even as Goethe makes the Earth-Spirit ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. One who believes that the pain in the world outweighs the joy, and expresses that unhappy conviction, only adds to the pain. Schopenhauer is an enemy to the race. Even if he earnestly believed that this is the most wretched of possible worlds, he should not promulgate a doctrine which robs men of the incentive to fight with circumstance. If Life gave him ashes ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... deal of restlessness and misgiving characterizes the minds of to-day in regard to all questions of religion. Europe, in the nineteenth century, as reflected in the works of Byron, Spencer, Darwin, and Schopenhauer, is very much in the same condition as intellectual Persia in the twelfth century, so far as the pessimism of Omar is representative of his day. This accounts for the wide popularity of Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat." ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... very plainly at a meeting of the Schopenhauer Society at Duesseldorf in June, 1915. He allows that the state has a right to wage a war of defence, but not to force anyone to serve in the army. Schopenhauer, he tells us, "esteems sympathy with all that lives and suffers more highly than ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... graceless maladies. He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Schanzer, Marie Schauroth, Delphine von Scheffer, Ary Scheidler, Dorette Schieferdecker, J.C. Schiller, Friedrich Schillingfurst-Hohenlohe, Prince Constantin Schindler, Anton Schmidt, Anton Schober, Franz von Schoelcher, Victor Schopenhauer, Arthur Schroeter, Corona Schroeter, Johann Samuel Schroeter, Mrs. R. Schubert, Franz Schumann, Clara (see also Wieck) Schumann, Robert Schure, Edouard Scott, Sir Walter Sebald, Amalia Senesino (rightly Francesco Bernardi) Seranzo, Paolo Seyfried, Ignaz X. von Shakespeare Sibilla, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... man," he exclaimed, testily. "But I don't care a damn about Schopenhauer and socialism, and I'm sure Mr. Hamilton doesn't. Let's get to the wages ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... spirit, and even his moral qualities, omits something of considerable importance to a thorough and consistent world-view. "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father," said one who spake as never man spake. I think it was Schopenhauer who once remarked, "The more I see of human nature the more I respect my dog." Now the New Theology finds no difficulty in recognising the importance of the brute creation, for it believes in a ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. Some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much religion or much work. Many who have not taken up permanent residence beneath the roof of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann are occasional guests. Then there is that great mass of pessimism which is the result, not of thought, but of mere discomfort, physical and super-physical. One may have attacks of pessimism from a variety of small causes. A bad stomach will produce ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... if, in reply, I remind you of the rude but vigorous words of that prince of cynics, Schopenhauer, 'Society is a fire at which the wise man from a prudent distance warms himself; not plunging into it, like the fool who after getting well blistered, rushes into the coldness of solitude, and complains that the fire burns.' ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... or VEDANTA (literally, "end of the Vedas"), occur in certain parts of the VEDAS as essential summaries. The UPANISHADS furnish the doctrinal basis of the Hindu religion. They received the following tribute from Schopenhauer: "How entirely does the UPANISHAD breathe throughout the holy spirit of the VEDAS! How is everyone who has become familiar with that incomparable book stirred by that spirit to the very depths of his soul! From every sentence deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... among those of great men which prove to be disappointments. In reading them one is not inclined to ask as of Schopenhauer's letters, why a philosophic genius of such depth should be laden with thousands of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... crape-silk under-girdle (koshi-obi) they bind themselves fast together, face to face, and so embracing leap into some deep lake or stream. Many are the modes by which they make their way to the Meido, when tortured by that world-old sorrow about which Schopenhauer wrote so ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... of a god wholly the artist; "and in this sense the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince us that even the horrible and the monstrous are no more than an aesthetic game played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital principle. "If it were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing figures of speech, "to imagine a dissonance becoming a human being (and what is man but that?), in order to endure life, this dissonance ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... departed workers; but does it exhaust human charity, or require contemptuous crusade against equally honest, living toilers? Are antiquity and foreign birthplace imperatively essential factors in the award of praise for even faithful and noble work? We lament the caustic moroseness of embittered Schopenhauer, brooding savagely over his failure to secure contemporaneous recognition; yet after all, did he malign his race, or his age, when, in answer to the inquiry where he desired to be buried, he scornfully exclaimed: "No matter ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Makes his living any old way. I know he's been a street fakir when he was down. Unscrupulous. Rob a corpse of a shroud—anything. Difference between him—and the bourgeoisie is that he robs without illusion. He'll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant, or anything, but the only thing in this world, not excepting Mary, that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is his little tin god. The only way to insult him is to take a ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... and powerful mind in the earlier half of the nineteenth century this realization of the true form of life came with quite overwhelming force, and that was to Schopenhauer, surely at once the most acute and the most biassed of mortal men. It came to him as a most detestable fact, because it happened he was an intensely egotistical man. But his intellect was of that noble and exceptional sort that aversion may tint indeed but cannot blind, and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... doubt its character changed after that. The idealists in poetry, music, and philosophy gave place to great men of science, to figures such as those of Ludwig and Liebig, of Gauss, Riemann, and Helmholtz. There came also historians like Ranke and Mommsen, musicians like Wagner, philosophers like Schopenhauer and Lotze, a statesman like Bismarck. To-day there are few men of great stature in Germany; there are, indeed, few men of genius anywhere in the world. But Germany still has a high general level in ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... a discussion arose as to whether Goethe had stolen from Schopenhauer, or Schopenhauer from Goethe, the comparison of man's life with the sun "which seems to set to our earthly eyes, but which in reality never sets, but shines on unceasingly." The conversation came to a pause, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... I fancied Reinecke a decent composer, Schopenhauer remarkable, if somewhat bitter in his philosophic attitude towards life. Reinecke is now a mere ghost of a ghost, a respectable memory of Leipsic, whilst Schopenhauer has been brutally elbowed out of his niche by his former follower, Nietzsche. In every cafe, in every ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at hand to glut it? Why should gregariousness drive a man to God rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house? Why should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer in a memorable passage (about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious. The parallel with the dog is not ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is the most illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so. According to him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy of its perceptions. Schopenhauer says, "He who is endowed with talent thinks ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... indeed more real than Providence, the jealous God more true than the good God? grief more certain than joy? darkness more secure of victory than light? Is it pessimism or optimism which is nearest the truth, and which—Leibnitz or Schopenhauer—has best understood the universe? Is it the healthy man or the sick man who sees best to the bottom of things? which is in ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a life of labour in the fields. Omar ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... and kindnesses like this, put James not alone among the democrats of this uncertain world, but among the poets also; among the poetic philosophers who, like Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Whitman, have a sense of the pace of things. Sunlight and storm-cloud, the subdued busyness of outdoors, the rumble of cities, the mud of life's beginning and the heaven of its hopes, stain his pages with the glad, sweaty sense of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... would, in a final revision of the Essay as a whole, have been modified so as to lay stress on this identification of the human will with the principle of Causality in the world at large—a doctrine the relation of which to the teachings of Schopenhauer will be evident to ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, that the craving for further explanation, the ontological wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As Schopenhauer says, "The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... expresses himself in one of his essays entitled, "Impressions of the Theatre": "In denying everything, one arrives immediately at symbols. In refuting life, one is but an involuntary apologist. I never believe so much in life as when I am reading the father of pessimism, Schopenhauer! As a result, life is powerful and victorious!... It is truth that always triumphs, and not falsehood; it is truth which is at the basis of life, and justifies it. All that persists is useful; the noxious element must disappear sooner or later, will ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Schopenhauer's idea, I believe," the young man said, pouring his wine with the smile ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... feared writers even bringing Hebrew. Despite the Oriental sandal which the cunning shoemaker had fashioned, his fellow-Jews saw the cloven hoof. They were not to be deceived by the specious sanctity which Darwin and Schopenhauer—probably Bishops of the Established Church—borrowed from their Hebrew lettering. Why, that was the very trick of the Satans who sprinkled the sacred tongue freely about handbills inviting souls that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sets of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, and Gorky; of Cooper and Mark Twain; of Hugo, and Zola, and Sue; and of Flaubert, De Maupassant, and Paul de Koch. He glanced curiously at the pages of Metchnikoff, Weininger, and Schopenhauer, and wonderingly at those of Ellis, Lydston, Krafft-Ebbing, and Forel. Woodruff's "Expansion of Races" was in his hands when Snow returned from further exploration ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... of Kantianism were early recognised by Schopenhauer, who also appears to have realised that what was wanted was another and a new key to unlock ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... restore to intuition the rights which were being filched or wrenched from it. He has shown (may it be said conclusively?) that systematised thought is quite unequal to grappling with the processes which constitute actual living. Before him, Schopenhauer had poured well-deserved contempt on the idea that the brain, an organ which can only work for a few hours at a stretch, and is dependent on all the accidents of the physical condition of the body, should be considered equal to solving the problems of existence. "Certainly" (writes Schwegler) ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Ruskin's Miscellanies, he discovered that it had been employed to support the dismantled leg of a dressing bureau. On another occasion, a volume of Schopenhauer, which he had been at much difficulty and expense to procure, Emerson's Essays, and two other volumes much prized, he found had served that lady as weights to hold down a piece of dry goods which she had sponged and spread to ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... attribute, this elan of the soul, discovers a fellowship in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment. It is, for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert, and Carlyle possess in common[8]. These men are not as others of their time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age, whose dawn has laid its hand ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... recognition was "Colombo," in 1830. Seventeen years later appeared his "Carmen, the Power of Love," of which Taine, in his celebrated essay on the work, says, "Many dissertations on our primitive savage methods, many knowing treatises like Schopenhauer's on the metaphysics of love and death, cannot compare to the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... scorning the aid of verb, adjective, or adverb, the gooseherd, by a masterpiece of profound and subtle emphasis, contrived to express the fact that he existed in a world of dead illusions, that he had become a convert to Schopenhauer, and that Mr. Curtenty's inapposite geniality was a ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... a life seem to exemplify the contrasting doctrines of Calvin and of Schopenhauer; of two courses, either is open. But at that time Shelley was more the being of emotion than of will—unless, indeed, will be confounded ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... see, that at one time, in ancient days, he has been devoted to civilisation with his whole soul, has served it, has sounded it to its depths, but it has exhausted him, disillusioned him, deceived him; he is a Faust, do you see?—a second Tolstoy. . . . As for Schopenhauer and Spencer, he treats them like small boys and slaps them on the shoulder in a fatherly way: 'Well, what do you say, old Spencer?' He has not read Spencer, of course, but how charming he is when with light, careless irony he says of his lady friend: 'She has read ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... kind to her, though many were alarmed by the intent force with which she set about her work. Very often she had no energy left for conversation, and would then take refuge in a book, a volume of Meredith, or Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer or Browning, who had been the poet of her first discovery of the world of books. That frightened off the young men, who were at first greatly taken with her charm. They were subdued themselves as everybody was, from the business manager down, but her silence chilled and alarmed them.... ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues—but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial—pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... given a musical education in Moscow, the White City—itself a dream of old Alexander Nevsky's days. Within sight of the Kremlin the slim and delicate youth fed upon the fatalistic writers of the nineteenth century. He knew Schopenhauer before he learned to pronounce German correctly; and the works of Bakounin, Herzen, Kropotkin became part of his cerebral tissue. Proudhon, Marx, and Ferdinand Lassalle taught him to hate wealth, property, power; and then he came across an old volume of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker |
