"If you want to know how you really feel about someone take a note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat."
"Man excels all animals, it is true. Even in his ability to be trained."
"Religions are the children of ignorance, and they do not long survive their mother. [...] As long as Chrstianisty exercised total influence over Western culture, civilization was at a low point. All religion is antagonistic towards culture."
"Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: Every writer writes badly, who writes only for gain."
"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them. As a rule, though, the purchase of books is mistaken as an appropriation of their contents."
"If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted of its purpose in the world."
(All from Arthur Schopenhauer's 'Essays and Aphorisms.')
-B.
Shane Mage wrote:
"The contrary view was promulgated by Schopenhauer, a runt whose 'Pessimistic' philosophy was shaped half by his lifelong sexual frustration and half by his lifelong resentment at Hegel, whose lectures were always full with paying students while he himself remained in poverty because nobody was willing to pay to listen to him."