Arthur Schopenhauer

Tysk filosof. Född 1788, död 1860. Pessimistist och haverist. Son till en köpman. Skrönor berättar om hur han kom fram till sin pessimistiska livssyn under två år i ungdomen då han, i väntan på fadersarvet, tvingades knoga på ett kontor. Livet är ett helvete, drivkraften är viljan (till livet) och sen kommer han med massa etik och allmäntyckande också. Hans stora verk är Världen som vilja och föreställning. En del tankar finns samlade i Arthur Schopenhauer - Essays and Aphorisms.

Citat

"For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it."

"That which has been no longer is; it as little exists as does that which has never been. But everything that is in the next moment has been. Thus the most insignificant present has over the most significant past the advantage of actuality, which means that the former bears to the latter the relation of something to nothing."

"...when such a mind ventures to criticize a doctrine different from the one he himself holds. All you find him concerned to do as a rule is to demonstrate that its dogmas differ from those of his own: with that he believes in all simplicity he has proved the falsity of the other doctrine."

"Not the least of the torments which plague our existens is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw a breath but pursues us all lika a taskmaster with a whip. It ceases to persecute only him it has delivered over to boredom."

"In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. For him who does know, children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of. Nonetheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition i which one can say: 'Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives'."

(citaten tagna ur Arthur Schopenhauer - Essays and Aphorisms som i sin tur är utdrag ur Schopenhauers sista verk: Paregas and Paralipomena.)