"The mind and body, then, are the instruments of the will [substitute for "will" the modern word "genes"].  It is the will that forms the grooves in the human embryo and builds the vessels for the circulation of the blood.  It is the will that fashions the brain.  It is the will to eat that shapes the mouth, the teeth and the throat; the will to reproduce that shapes the sexual organs; the will to grow that attracts the plant to the sun.  Can the agitated struggle of men and mates and children be the work of reason?  Not at all.  It is the will.  Life is the instinctive will to live.  Rivalry and struggle and destruction are therefore the essentials of life.  For the wills of all individuals wage a ceaseless war upon one another.  The will itself has no motive, no aim, no purpose and no limit.  It is a blind and endless and futile striving.  Victory alternates with defeat, and life with death.  The will to live drives everything ultimately to self-destruction.  And finally, each man succumbs to the will of the worms."  Paraphrase, Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941,  p. 226.

"The universal will to live conquers its eternal enemy, death, through the reproductive organs of the species.  Nature doesn't care at all about the individual; she is concerned only with the type [read type, kind, nature, race, etc as "gene"].  As soon as the individual reproduces his kind he has lost all value for Nature.  After he has completed his task man is ripe for the grave.  Nature has deceived the individual into perpetuating the misery of his race.  She has endowed woman for a few years with a wealth of charm...  at the expense of the rest of her life, so that during those years of youth she may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he is hurried away into undertaking the honorable care of her...  Then, just as the female ant, after fecundation, loses her wings, which are now superfluous... so, after giving birth to one or two children, a woman loses her beauty.  Her mission has been accomplished.  Time to make way for younger, healthier bodies to carry on the work of reproduction.  What an irony, this perpetuation of the race.  And how foolish we are to love!"   Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941,  p 233.

"...It is the will that rules.  The mind is merely its servant.  We do not want a thing because we reason.  We find reasons for a thing because we want it.  The mind is always inventing logic for the whims of the will."  Paraphrase,  Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941,  p. 226.

"What value can a creature have that is not a whit different from millions of its kind?  Millions, do I say? nay, an infinitude of creatures which, century after century, in never-ending flow, Nature sends bubbling up from her inexhaustible springs; as generous with them as the smith with the useless sparks that fly around his anvil.  ...  Will, then, is that which we possess in common with all men, nay, with all animals, and even with lower forms of existence...  On the other hand, that which places one being over another, and sets differences between man and man, is intellect and knowledge...  Every violent exhibition of will is common and vulgar; in other words, it reduces us to the level of the species, and makes us a mere type and example of it...  Contrarily, if a man desires to be absolutely uncommon, in other words, great, he should never allow his consciousness to be taken possession of and dominated by the movement of his will..."  Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941.

"The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well." Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941, p. 246.

"The healthy man asks not so much for happiness as for an opportunity to exercise his capacities; and if he must pay the penalty of pain for his freedom and this power, he makes the forfeit cheerfully; it is not too great a price."  Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941, p. 261.

"Let men recognize the snare that lies in women's beauty, and the absurd comedy of reproduction will end.  ... How long shall we be lured into this much-ado-about-nothing, this endless pain that leads only to a painful end?"  Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941, p. 258.

"...the principle that the end justifies the means.  I have no inclination for a compromise founded on that basis.  Religion may be an excellent means of taming and training the perverse, obtuse and wicked biped race:  but in the eyes of the friend of truth every fraud, however pious, is still a fraud.  A pack of lies would be a strange means of inducing virtue.  The flag to which I have sworn allegiance is truth:  I shall stay faithful to it everywhere and, regardless of the outcome, fight for light and truth.  If I see religion in the ranks of the enemy..." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970),p 107.

"To free a man from an error is not to deprive him of anything, but to give him something:  for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth.  No error is harmless:  sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbors it.  Therefore, deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 108.

"Oh yes, princes use the Lord God as a bogey to get their grown-up children to bed when nothing else will any longer serve; which is why they value Him so highly... since that ultima ratio theologorum (final argument of theology), the stake, has gone out of use, the effectiveness of this means of government has much diminished.  For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms:  they need darkness in order to shine.  A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion, the element in which alone it is able to live.  Perhaps the day so often prophesied will soon come, when religions will depart from European man, like a nurse whose care the child has outgrown and which henceforth comes under the instruction of a tutor.  For articles of faith, based on nothing but authority, miracles and revelation are beyond doubt short-term aids appropriate only to the childhood of mankind:  and it must be admitted that a race which, according to all the indications provided by physical and historical data, is at present no older than one hundred times the life of a man of sixty, is still in its first childhood."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 109.

"...which explains... the poverty of the scribbling which in all nations passes itself off to its contemporaries as their literature, and on the other the fate that overtakes true and genuine men who appear among such people.  All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people:  so it is no wonder the attempt does not always come off.  For a writer to afford enjoyment always demands a certain harmony between his way of thinking and that of the reader; and the enjoyment will be the greater the more perfect this harmony is; so that a great mind will fully and completely enjoy only another great mind..."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970),  p 126.

"Intellect is fundamentally  a hard-working factory-hand whom his demanding master, the will, keeps busy from morn to night.  But if this hard-working serf should once happen to do some of his work voluntarily during his free time, on his own initiative and without any object but the work itself, simply for his own satisfaction and enjoyment - then this (will be) a genuine work of art; indeed, if pushed to an extreme, a work of genius." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p. 127.

"...intellect arose merely in order to serve the will.  ...Most men, to be sure, are incapable of any other employment of their intellect, because with them it is merely a tool in service of their will, and is entirely consumed by this service, without any remainder.  ...their intellect subsides into inactivity the moment their will ceases to drive it." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p. 128.

"...this tendency towards a free and thus abnormal employment of the intellect, together with the capacity for it, attains in the genius the point at which knowledge becomes the main thing, the aim of the whole of life;  his own existence, on the other hand, declines to a subsidiary thing, a mere means; so that the normal relationship is completely reversed." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p.129.

"...genius ... is an impediment:  for with this intensifying of the intellectual powers, intuitive comprehension of the outside world achieves so great a degree of objective clarity, and furnishes so much more than is requisite for serving the will, that such an abundance becomes a downright hindrance to this service, ...  For the service of the will an entirely superficial contemplation of things suffices, a contemplation which furnishes no more than their bearing on whatever aims we may have..."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p.130.

"It is obvious that an animal possesses intellect only for the purpose of discovering and capturing its food; the degree of intellect it possesses is determined by this purpose.  It is no different in the case of man." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p59.

"...the world as will is the primary (world) and the world as idea the secondary world.  The former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousand-fold misery.  The latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining.  Enjoyment of this spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p.156.

"Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal.  We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature:  but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart, and anarchy supervenes, it reveals itself for what it is.  For enlightenment on this matter, though, you have no need to wait until that happens:  there exist hundreds of reports, recent and less recent, which will suffice to convince you that man is in no way inferior to the tiger or the hyena in pitilessness and cruelty...  "  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p. 138.

"That anyone who no longer wishes to live for himself must go on living merely as a machine for others to use is an extravagant demand." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 148.

"All princes were no doubt in fact originally victorious commanders... having acquired standing armies, they regarded the people as a means of feeding themselves and their soldiers, that is to say as a herd which one looks after so that it may provide wool, milk and meat."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 151.

"Justice is in itself powerless:  what rules by nature is force.  To draw this over on to the side of justice, so that by means of force justice rules - that is the problem of statecraft."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 152.

"There are no other revelations than the thoughts of the wise... To this extent, therefore, it is all one whether you live and die trusting in your own thoughts or those of others, for you are never trusting in anything but human thoughts and human opinion.  Yet as a rule men have a weakness for putting trust in those who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge rather than in their own heads; but if you bear in mind the tremendous inequality between man and man, then the thoughts of one may very well count with another as a revelation." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 181.

"...But this must have been foreseen by at any rate Him who firstly failed to make men better than they are and then set a trap for them into which he must have known they would fall, since everything was his work and nothing was hidden from him.  According to this dogma, then, he called into existence out of nothing a weak and sin-prone race in order to hand it over to endless torment.  There is finally the further fact that the God who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every sin, even to the point of loving one's enemy, fails to practice it himself, but does rather the opposite:  since a punishment which is introduced at the end of things, when all is over and done with forever, can be intended neither to improve nor deter; it is nothing but revenge.  Thus regarded, it seems that the entire race is in fact definitely intended and expressly created for eternal torment and damnation  -  all, that is, apart from those few exceptions which are rescued from this fate by divine grace, although one knows not why.  These aside, it appears as if the dear Lord created the world for the benefit of the Devil - in which event he would have done better not to have created it at all.  This is what happens to dogmas when you take them (literally)."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 184.

"On the other hand, if this Augustinian dogma of the tiny number of the elect and the great number of the eternally damned is understood merely (allegorically) and interpreted in the sense of our own philosophy, then it agrees with the fact that only very few achieve denial of the will and thereby redemption from this world...   What, on the other hand, this dogma hypostatizes as eternal damnation is nothing other than this world of ours:  this is what devolves upon all the rest.  It is a sufficiently evil place:  it is Purgatory, it is Hell, and devils are not lacking in it.  Only consider what men sometimes inflict upon men, with what ingenious torments one will slowly torture another to death, and ask yourself whether devils could do more.  And sojourn in this place is likewise eternal for all those who obdurately persist in affirming the will to live." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970),  p 186.

"Those who think the sciences can go on advancing and spreading wider and wider without threatening the continued existence and prosperity of religion are very much in error.  Physics and metaphysics are the natural enemies of religion.  To speak of peace and accord between them is very ludicrous:  it is a (war of extermination).  Religions are the children of ignorance, and they do not long survive their mother.  Omar understood that when he burned the library at Alexandria:  his reason for doing so  -  that the knowledge contained in the books was either also contained in the Koran or was superfluous  -  is regarded as absurd, but is in fact very shrewd if taken (with a grain of salt):  it signifies that if the sciences go beyond the Koran they are enemies of religion and consequently not to be tolerated.  Christianity would be in much better shape today if Christian rulers had been as wise as Omar.  By now, however, it is a little late to burn all the books." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 196-197.

"Dilettantes! Dilettantes!  - this is the derogatory cry (directed at) those who apply themselves to art or science for the sake of gain raise against those who pursue it for love of it and pleasure in it...  The truth, however, is that to the dilettante the thing is the end, while to the professional as such it is the means; and only he who is diretly interested in a thing, and occupies himself with it from love of it, will pursue it with entire seriousness.  It is from such as these, and not from wage-earners, that the greatest things have always come." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 227.

"One giant calls to another through the weary space of the centuries (referring to Kant and himself), and the myriads of pygmies who are crawling below can hear nothing but a faint sound overhead...  These pygmies ape one another in an orgy of buffonery, adorn themselves with what the giants have dropped, and acclaim as their greatest heroes those who are pygmies like themselves..."  Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941, p. 230.

"Once when I was collecting specimens under an oak tree I found, among the other plants and weeds, and of the same size as they, a plant of a dark colour with contracted leaves and a straight, rigid stalk.  When I made to touch it, it said in a firm voice:  'Let me alone!  I am no weed for your herbarium, like these others to whom nature has given a bare year of life.  My life is measured in centuries:  I am a little oak tree.'  -  Thus does he whose influence is to be felt across the centuries stand, as a child, as a youth, often still as a man, indeed as a living creature as such, apparently like the rest and as insignificant as they.  But just give him time and, with time, those who (will) know how to recognize him.  He will not die like the rest."  Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p 236.

For a more complete list of Schopenhauer writing excerpts, click on Schopenhauer and go to the three local links for the books with his name in the description.

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