Arthur Schopenhauer author photo

Arthur Schopenhauer

Né(e): February 22, 1788 – Danzig, Royal Prussia, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimistic metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and reflections on will, suffering, and desire. His major works include The World as Will and Representation and Parerga and Paralipomena. Though underappreciated early, he later gained broad international readership and influenced Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, and modern existential thought.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, in Danzig, then a semi-autonomous city and now Gdańsk, Poland, into a prosperous merchant family. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, expected him to enter commerce, while his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, later became a well-known novelist and salon host. After the family moved to Hamburg, he received a cosmopolitan education shaped by travel, languages, and exposure to European intellectual life. A decisive turning point came after his father’s death in 1805, when he gradually abandoned a business career and turned toward scholarship. He studied at Göttingen, where he encountered Plato and Kant, and later continued in Berlin before completing his doctorate at Jena in 1813 with a dissertation on the principle of sufficient reason.

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Citations

quote
The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom
-The Wisdom of Life
quote
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness, whatever it may be, for gain, advancement, learning or fame, let alone, then, for fleeting sensual pleasures
-The Wisdom of Life
quote
For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,—the less, indeed, other people can be to him
-The Wisdom of Life
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Riches, one may say, are like sea-water; the more you drink the thirstier you become; and the same is true of fame
-The Wisdom of Life
quote
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world
-Further Psychological Observations
quote
Reading is thinking with some one else's head instead of one's own
-Thinking for Oneself
quote
Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind
-On Reading and Books
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The doctor sees mankind in all its weakness; the lawyer in all its wickedness; the theologian in all its stupidity
-Psychological Observations
quote
Life is a task to be done
-On the Sufferings of the World

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Voix de la Communauté

"Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher, often called the "philosopher of pessimism."

Britannica

"The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer has always been regarded as pre-eminently creative, as an artist-philosophy par excellence"

Thomas Mann

"Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place"

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"And this is why I want to bring to mind the one teacher and severe taskmaster of whom I boast: Arthur Schopenhauer"

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Arthur Schopenhauer has been dubbed the artist’s philosopher on account of the inspiration his aesthetics has provided to artists of all stripes"

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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