Arthur Schopenhauer based human Understanding on Kant’s thing-in-itself which he believed was the ‘will’ to live that makes all organisms want to stay alive – sort of. For a hard-line pragmatist he oddly liked to keep it loose, with multiple layers containing infinite shades, sides and angles. His most profound concepts revolve around this ‘Willing’, which he mentions every chance he gets – a sure sign he doesn’t really believe it. But this GUT – Great Unifying Theory – does explain his single-mindedness; and some of his mongrel, morbid maxims certainly make sense – to your jaded cynic. I list below several quotes taken from his essays.

  • Pleasure is merely the negation of pain – which leaves pain as the positive element in a man’s life.

  • A man’s behaviour is tempered by the following: fear of punishment; superstition, or fear of punishment in a future life; sympathy; honour or fear of shame; justice, or objective attachment to good faith, which is usually advantageous to himself.

  • People who make a fortune through the exercise of their talents almost always come to see their talent as their capital and the money they acquired as merely the interest on it. They do not save and often fall into poverty as their talent is exhausted or becomes antiquated. Tradesmen working with their hands do not have this problem. Nor people who inherit money who know to distinguish between capital and interest and how to maintain their position.

  • The man born with natural talent can never compete with cringing mediocrity; he sees the inferiority of those above him and becomes shy and refractory. As Juvenal said, ‘It is difficult to rise if your poverty is greater than your talent.’

  • The value we set upon the opinion of others, and constant endeavour in respect of it, are quite out of proportion to any benefit we may hope to attain. This attention to other people’s regard is a kind of mania which we all employ. Our every luxury panders to this obsession – the vanity, pretension, show and swagger – all points of honour, PRIDE, ambition – are driven by it.

  • Honour is the respect we pay to other people’s rating of us.

  • On attitudes towards Merit: have your own or refuse any to others. The latter is more convenient, so is generally adopted. As envy is a sign of deficiency; to envy merit argues the lack of it. Which explains how modesty came to be a virtue – invented as protection from envy.

  • ‘Life consists in movement’, Aristotle. We exist intellectually through continual occupation – either creating or learning. Happiest are those who are conscious of the power of creating great works animated by some significant purpose which adds a rare flavour to the whole of their lives – a formal interest that sharpens perception.

  • Material interest has become the real foundation to human relationships. Position, character, occupation, nationality, familial background are as tickets attached to commercial goods. In the place of true esteem and genuine friendship we have the outward appearance of it – like paper money rather than coin.

  • Of the three great powers: SAGACITY, STRENGTH and LUCK., the last is most efficacious.

  • Ignorance is only degrading when accompanied with riches.

  • Art has no relationship with the Will. Art serves no end to a man yet we derive pleasure from it despite its lack of benefit. Aesthetic perception has no place in consciousness. As it is the Will that causes all our sorrows the feeling of pleasure that accompanies perception of Beauty removes the suffering.
As all our ideas, powers of insight, active endeavours are used to service our personal aims artistic creation is usually over-ruled. The standard aim is to understand the relations of things, not their inner reality as essential to the true artist.

  • Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head. We cannot alter our heart.

  • Joy and sorrow are not ideas of the mind but affections of the Will, and so they do not lie in the domain of memory. Thus, we cannot renew our happy feelings, we can only recall the ideas that accompanied them to form a gauge of our feelings at the time.

  • Englishmen entertain a particular contempt for gesticulation, and regard it as vulgar and undignified.

  • Individuality is not phenomenal by nature. Genuine moral or intellectual merit is innate and not acquired. Man achieves only what is born with him – apprehension of this is what constitutes his career.

  • A hundred fools together will not make one wise man.

  • Will is the foundation of Being – the permanent element in everything – the thing all organisms have in common.