Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes on Knowledge
Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813, expanded 1847) and the World as Will and Representation (1818) develop a Kantian epistemology pushed to a metaphysical conclusion Kant himself had refused. The world as representation is the domain of the principle of sufficient reason — phenomena ordered by space, time, causation, and the structure of the cognizing subject — but the world as will is the thing-in-itself of which the phenomenal world is the manifestation, and the human being's privileged inner access to the will through bodily volition supplies the bridge between the two aspects. The framework grounds Schopenhauer's pessimist metaphysics, his aesthetics of music as the most direct image of the will, and his ethics of compassion as the proper response to the will's universal suffering.
Quotes
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“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Das Talent gleicht dem Schützen, der ein Ziel trifft, welches die Uebrigen nicht erreichen können; das Genie dem, der eines trifft, bis zu welchem sie nicht ein Mal zu sehn vermögen... | Vol. II, Ch. III, para. 31 (On Genius), 1844 | As cited in The Little Book of Bathroom Philosophy: Daily Wisdom from the Greatest Thinkers (2004) by Gregory Bergman, p. 137 -
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
Psychological Observations -
“The world is my representation.”
From The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges, 1999 -
“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 sa”
Letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (November 1815) [ citation needed ] -
“Obit anus, abit onus.”
The old woman dies, the burden is lifted. Statement Schopenhauer wrote in Latin into his account book, after the death of a seamstress to whom he had made court-ordered payments of 15 thalers a quarter for over twenty years, after she had accused him of having injured her arm; as quoted in Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann (1877) by Francis Bowen , p. 392. Schopenhauer