Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Friday 10 March 2023

It may seem strange

that I find it easier to write my thoughts
than speak them. But no, because of
their repeated, senseless, Ça va? and How's it going?
I don't speak to people any more.

I have become a non-misogynistic Schopenhauer:

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

=======================

More from Schopenhauer:

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. [This is patently untrue, witness Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoyevski, etc.]

Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, is probably the best thing about it.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of Animal Training, for it trains people how to [think that they] think.

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet humans believe that death is the annhilation of being.

Nobility of character is proportionate to the lack of pleasure in the company of others. [This is a bit tendentious, but could be true!]

A man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/13133-Arthur_Schopenhauer

Had Schopenhauer been a bit
more modern in expression, he might have written:

Civilisation has sliced and chewed us up,
every one of us a piece of shit.


1 comment:

Wofl said...

Arthur Schopenhauer was my special subject at the Queen's University of Belfast (now part of the University of Ulster0 because (mercifully) I could not study hippophile Nietzsche. In my finals I took an ultra-Nietzschean (probably also ultra-Schopenhauerian) stance in discussing Schopenhauer, and did not obtain a degree...although in years to come I was offered a doctorate by the Courtauld Institute of the University of London for my work on Obscenæ in Mediæval Sculpture – which could, of course, not be awarded because I lacked a primary degree.

I had read very little of Schopenhauer, whose prose style is abominably Germanic, and retained even less, because of my terrible memory.