Education relates to the natural advantages of the intellect, as the planets and satellites do to the sun. For an educated common man does not speak what he himself thinks, but what others have thought, and does not what he could do himself, but what he has learned from others.
Objectively, honor is others' opinion of our worth, and subjectively, it is our fear of others' opinions.
A philistine is a man who is always and very seriously concerned with a reality that is, in fact, unreal.
The common people give themselves to the full of existence, and the genius is predominantly in a mood of knowledge. Hence the double difference between a genius and a common man. First of all, to be is possible only in one way..., and to be known is to know innumerable things, identifying with them, to a certain extent, through... objective existence. Second, seeing, knowing is pleasant, but being is terrible, because being for the sake of being is torment. From the first difference it follows that the life of ordinary people is, in fact, extremely boring. We see, for example, that rich people have the same constant and hard struggle with boredom that the poor have with need. The second difference explains why the life of the common people bears the stamp of a dull, gloomy, monotonous seriousness, while on the forehead of a genius there is a peculiar clarity which, despite the fact that his sufferings are greater than those of men common, always shining through suffering like the sun in a storm cloud. This is even more striking when we observe a man of genius and a common man in their time of suffering. Then it is proved that the difference between them is the same as that between the man to whom it is proper to laugh and the animals which do not laugh.
Loneliness is the fate of all eminent minds.
One of the essential obstacles to the prosperity of the human race must be considered the fact that people do not listen to the one who is smarter than others, but to the one who speaks the loudest.
Optimism seems to me not only absurd, but downright shameless, a bitter mockery of the indescribable sufferings of mankind.
A man alone is weak, like an abandoned Robinson: only in communion with others can he do much.
The first commandment of women's honor consists in not engaging in concubinage with men, so that every man is obliged to resort to marriage as a surrender.
The first forty years of our life constitute a text, and the next thirty years are commentaries on this text, making us understand its true meaning.
The mode of life, aspirations, and morals of insects and the lower animals may be regarded as the first steps of nature; our properties, qualities and aspirations are found in them in an embryonic state.
After the death of the will, the death of the body can no longer be embarrassing. In this we must see the manifestation of eternal justice. What frightens the bad man the most, he being aware of it, is death itself. She, of course, is well known to the good man, but he is not afraid of her. Since all wickedness consists in the ferocious desire to live, for every man, according to the measure of his own wickedness or goodness, death is either hard or easy, nay welcome. The termination of an individual life is an evil or a good, depending on whether the man is good or evil.
By the thing itself, or by the inner essence of the world, I mean that which is nearest to us — the will. Although this expression is subjective in relation to the subject of knowledge, and because knowledge is transmissible to others, this relationship is significant. Thus it is much better to call the essence of the world will, than Brahma, universal soul, or otherwise.
Just as a perfect body is not exempt from filth and fetid discharges, so even the noblest character is not exempt from bad traits, and sometimes even the greatest genius is not exempt from limits.
Just as a drowning man sinks to the bottom and rises again, so the best men come to repentance as a result of sin. So is, for example, Gretchen in Faust. Sin, in this case, acts as a nightmare from which we wake.
The clarity of the phenomenon refers to the field of representation and is conditioned by a connection of one idea with another. And incomprehensibility begins every time a phenomenon comes into contact with the area of the will, that is, when the will comes into direct contact with the idea. For example, a simple hand touch of one's own body, despite the simplicity of this phenomenon, its essence is difficult to understand. Nor are all the phenomena of organic life, of vegetation, of crystallization and the force of nature clear, for in all these cases the will manifests itself directly.
Because philosophy is not knowledge according to the law of knowledge, but is a knowledge of ideas, it must be counted as an art, because it sets forth an idea abstractly, and not intuitively, as science does. But strictly speaking, philosophy is a cross between science and art, or something that brings them into contact.
Nature is more aristocratic than man. The differences of title and status in European societies, as well as the differences of caste in India, are nothing compared to the differences in the mental and moral qualities of men, which are determined by nature itself. Like a social aristocracy, so in natural aristocracy there are ten thousand commoners to a nobleman, and millions of people to a prince. And here, the majority is a mob. Therefore, the patricians of nature, the so-called nobility of nature, as well as the nobility of the state, must not merge with the crowd, but, on the contrary, the higher the capacities and talents, the more they must be distinguished from the others.
The works of all truly talented people are distinguished from others by a character of firmness, and therefore by clarity and certainty, because such people understand very clearly what they want to express - whether in prose, or in poetry, or in sounds. The others lack this firmness and clarity, and they immediately distinguish themselves by this lack.
The curse of a genius is that while he appears to others as great, they appear to him as miserable and insignificant. The genius is forced to suppress this perception throughout his life, just as ordinary people keep their image of that genius within themselves. At the same time, a genius without equal lives as if he were in a desert or on a desert island inhabited only by monkeys and parrots. Moreover, he is always haunted by the threat of the illusion of mistaking an ape for a man. While the weaknesses of a great man cause the crowd a feeling of malice, he, on the contrary, feels pain because these weaknesses make him similar to the crowd.
It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to justify.
An experiment can replace thinking as little as reading. Pure empiricism is to thinking as eating food is to digesting and assimilating it. Even if empiricism boasts that it is the only one thanks to whose discoveries it has increased the progress of human knowledge, it brings with it the situation in which the mouth would boast that the body owes its existence to it alone.
Space, unlike the body that fills it, obviously has no body, being therefore spiritual, that is, something that exists only in the spirit, that is, in the intellect.
A radical improvement of the human race and the general condition of human society can be achieved if the conventional table of ranks coincides with those differences which are established by nature itself, so that the pariah of nature does all the inferior work, the sudras - all the kinds of mechanical works, if the Vaisyas were engaged in industry and commerce, if the Kshatriyas were rulers, generals, kings, and the Brahmins were engaged in the arts and sciences. But today the conventional table of ranks rarely coincides with natural differences, and is often even in flagrant contradiction with them.
The division of the inner Self, hitherto considered indivisible, into will and cognition, was as unexpected as the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen; this is the crucial point of my philosophy and at the same time the beginning of the strict distinction between visual and abstract cognition.
The difference in the measure of spiritual powers, which constitutes the deep gulf between a genius and a common mortal, depends on nothing else than the more or less advanced development of the cerebral system; but this difference is so great, because the whole real world, in which we live, exists only in relation to the cerebral system, and therefore as this system looks, so does the world look.
The difference between dogmatism and criticism is that the latter tries to wake us up and the former sways us even more. Many scientists are opponents of philosophy only because they only notice the aforementioned property of dogmatism, and they reject criticism for its difficulty.
From the point of view of youth, life is an infinitely long future; from the point of view of old age, life is a very short past.
The truest consolation in all trouble and suffering lies in the contemplation of people who are more unhappy than we are - and this is accessible to everyone.
The suicidal person stops living precisely because he cannot stop wanting.