Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes on God
Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19th-century German philosopher best known for his metaphysical pessimism and his theory of the world as will and representation. This page collects quotes attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer on the topic of god, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that distinguishes the philosopher . He must be like Sophocles ' Oedipus , who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.”
Letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (November 1815) [ citation needed ] -
“Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)”
Think of the fanaticism, the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no conception! Think of the crusades, a butchery lasting two hundred years and inexcusable, its war cry “It is the will of God,” its object to gain possession of the grave of one who preached love and sufferance; think of the cruel expul- sion and extermination of the Moors and J -
“Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)”
In an essay on ‘“The Christian System,” he argued that the visions of the Old and New Testament are so unalike that the latter “‘must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian. -
“The Christian System" in ' Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays (1910) as translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, p. 105”
When the Church says that, in the dogmas of religion , reason is totally incompetent and blind, and its use to be reprehended, this really attests the fact that these dogmas are allegorical in their nature, and are not to be judged by the standard which reason, taking all things sensu proprio , can alone apply. Now the absurdities of a dogma are just the mark and sign of what is allegorical and my