Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Parerga and Paralipomena, "Appendices" and "Omissions"

By Arthur Schopenhauer

Philosophical reflections on Schopenhauer’s previous books, this was his last major work and—because his earlier efforts were so unpopular—this one had a hard time getting into print. After much difficulty, 750 copies were printed with Schopenhauer’s payment being 10 copies. One copy found it’s way to an English translator who both translated and wrote articles about it that were translated back into German ironically making Schopenhauer popular.

Quotes from Parerga and Paralipomena, "Appendices" and "Omissions"

“A truth won by thinking for ourselves is like a natural limb: it alone really belongs to us. This is the difference between a thinker and a mere scholar.”

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“Accustom yourself to regarding the world as a place of suffering, a sort of penal colony and expect the calamities, torments, and miseries of life as normal... this makes us see other people in their true light and reminds us of what is most important: tolerance, patience charity”

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“All religion is antagonistic to culture... genuine morality is dependent on no religion”

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Themes: Integrity Culture

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“an age which for 20 years has applauded a Hegel—that intellectual Caliban—as the greatest of the philosophers, so loudly that it echoes through the whole of Europe... it's applause is prostituted, and its censure has no significance”

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“As the biggest library in disorder is not as useful as a small, well organized one; a vast accumulation of knowledge is of far less value than a much smaller amount thought through and compared to personal experience and other knowledge.”

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“Between the ethics of the Greeks and those of the Hindus, there exists a glaring antithesis—the Greek goal to lead a happy life, the Hindu to liberate and redeem from life altogether.”

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“Between the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism and the spirit of Christianity, the real antithesis is the pagan affirmation of the will to life opposed to the Christian denial of the will to life with a search for a redemption from the world.”

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Themes: Christianity

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“Christianity is dead and no longer exercises much influence. When it did, civilization was at a very point in Christian countries.”

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Themes: Christianity

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“If justice ruled on earth it would be sufficient to have built one's house: it would require not further protection than this manifest right of possession. But because injustice is the order of the day, whoever bult the house must also be in a position to protect it”

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Themes: Control Justice

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“If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age, you must keep in step with it. But if you do that, you will never produce anything great. For that, you must focus on posterity. Be like a man who spends his life on a desert island working to erect a memorial so that future seafarers will know he once existed.”

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Themes: Crazy Wisdom

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“It is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life… other people’s thoughts are like crumbs form another’s table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest.”

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Themes: Pluralism Truth

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“Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”

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Themes: True Self

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“Nevertheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say, 'Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst arrives.'”

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Themes: Old Age

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“Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the center of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the sure point at which it can remain at rest.”

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Themes: Middle Way

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“Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms of—one might almost say two words for—the same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others”

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Themes: Slavery Poverty

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“Religions are the children of ignorance and do not long survive their mother... Mankind is growing out of religion as out of its childhood clothes.”

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“Sexual desire—especially when concentrated with fixated infatuation on a particular person—becomes the quintessence of this world's delusion because it promises so excessively much and delivers so miserably little.”

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Themes: Pleasure Sex

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“the state is essentially no more than an institution for the protection of the whole against attacks from without and the protection of its individual members from attacks by one another... the necessity for the state ultimately depends on the acknowledged injustice of the human race: without this no one would ever have thought of the state since no one would have needed to fear any encroachment”

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Themes: Government

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“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride... it argues that he has no qualities of his own... Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”

Chapters: 72. Helpful Fear
78. Water

Themes: Nationalism

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“The human need for socialization drives human porcupines together [‘Schopenhauer’s or The Porcupine’s dilemma’] only to be mutually repelled by the many irritating qualities of the others (‘familiarity breeds contempt’). Codes of politeness and manners create a tolerable but unsatisfying balance between social warmth and irritation so the more independent and self-sufficient prefer more solitude.”

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“the mind must—if it is really to philosophize—also be truly disengaged: it must prosecute no particular goal or aim, and thus be free from the enticement of will”

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“The more active the imagination, the fewer perceptions from outside transmitted to us by the senses. Long periods of silence and solitude nurture it, journeys, the bustle of life, and high noons of stimulation chase it far away.”

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“The more clearly you become conscious of the frailty, vanity, and dream-like quality of all things, the more clearly will you also become conscious of the eternity of your own inner being”

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Themes: Immortality Dream

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“There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year”

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“Time ceases to persecute only those it has delivered over to boredom.”

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Themes: Carpe diem Time

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“to attain a clear consciousness, a main requirement is to comprehend anything that "goes without saying" as a problem”

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Themes: Openness

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“Too much reading robs the mind of all elasticity... the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book (smart phone or computer) every time you have a free moment.”

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“While the intellectual horizon of the normal man is wider than that of the animal—one continual present with no consciousness of past or future—it is not so immeasurably wide as generally supposed.”

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Themes: Mind

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“You can only know what you have thought about and thinking has to be kindled like a fire. Reading can spark this kind of thinking when it forcibly imposes ideas on the mind foreign to it’s mood, beliefs, and prejudices.”

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Themes: Education

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