The Wisdom of Life – Arthur Schopenhauer
Notes:
The fundamental reality and driving force of the world is will. Will is a form of desire, a need of something. Need and pain are what is positive in the world. Thus happiness is a negation or renunciation of this will. All phenomena develop from will.
Schop: Our present existence is an infinitesimal moment between two eternities, the past and the future. Observing our moment is like Plato’s cave dwellers observing their shadows. One might think their tiny shadowy pocket of a moment that they call life is a comedy, but zoom out and it’s a tragedy, a long record of struggle and pain, with the death of the hero as the final certainty.
Hope for the future is a tacit admission of evil in the present.
Cum grano salis = with a grain of salt.
Cheerfulness is the flower of health. Health = avoid every kind of excess, all violent and unpleasant emotion, all mental overstrain, take daily exercise in the open air, cold baths and such…
The body is constantly in internal motion—the heart, the stomach, intestines, lungs, glands, brain, breath, etc. This ceaseless internal motion requires some external counterpart.
Smartphone addiction: Intellectual dullness is caused by a constant and lively attention to all the trivial circumstances of the world. This is the true cause of boredom—a continual panting after excitement, in order to have a pretext for giving the mind and spirits something to occupy them.
The intellectual life is like a slowly-forming work of art that acquires a consistency and unity which becomes ever more and more complete.
“Forced labour” is the natural lot of every mortal. Only those outside the need to labor are “free.” “Inherited wealth reaches its utmost value when it falls to the individual endowed with mental powers of a high order, who is resolved to pursue a line of life not compatible with the making of money.” This individual “will pay his debt to mankind a hundred times, … by producing some work which contributes to the general good, and redounds to the honour of humanity at large.”
After health, the next most important factor in happiness is “the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.”
If you are superior in something, you should focus on that. If you pretend not to be gifted “and hob-nob with the generality of other people,” they will treat you as one of themselves.
Schop: Society places way too much stock in “knightly honor” and gets way too offended by physical blows. Corporal punishment can be a good thing. Animals do it. It’s natural. Must be done not as an insult to honor or dignity, but as a punishment to those who “possess nothing and therefore cannot be fined.”
The longer a man’s fame is likely to last, the later it will be in coming. The more a man belongs to posterity, in other words, to humanity in general, the more of an alien he is to his contemporaries.
“Fame and youth are too much for a mortal at one and the same time.” Why child stars crash out.
People who possess true genius should study matters common to all humanity. Because they alone can find new insights. Those of ordinary intellect should study more specific topics but with great intensity and work ethic.
Quotes:
Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness and happens for it alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of this consciousness, which is in most cases far more important than the circumstances which go to form its contents.
See also: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.” -John Milton
See also: “Temperament puts all divinity to rout.” -Emerson
Hunger is the best sauce.
The only thing that stands in our power to achieve, is to make the most advantageous use possible of the personal qualities we possess, and accordingly to follow such pursuits only as will call them into play, to strive after the kind of perfection of which they admit and to avoid every other; consequently, to choose the position, occupation and manner of life which are most suitable for their development.
Nine-tenths of our happiness depends upon health alone.
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.
Beauty is an open letter of recommendation.
The happiest destiny on earth is to have the rare gift of a rich individuality, and, more especially, to be possessed of a good endowment of intellect.
My philosophy, for instance, has never brought me in a sixpence; but it has spared me many an expense.
A dilettante interest in art is a very different thing from creative activity.
To measure a man’s happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try to express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator.
Most men set the utmost value precisely on what other people think, and are more concerned about it than about what goes on in their own consciousness, which is the thing most immediately and directly present to them. They reverse the natural order,—regarding the opinions of others as real existence and their own consciousness as something shadowy.
He is the happiest man who, no matter how, manages sincerely to admire himself.