The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~45,700 words · 217 passages
Cite this work
- APAArthur Schopenhauer. (n.d.). The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-counsels-and-maxims
- MLAArthur Schopenhauer. "The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-counsels-and-maxims.
- ChicagoArthur Schopenhauer. The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-counsels-and-maxims.
What it is about
Counsels and maxims for getting through life, from the second half of the Aphorisms.
Context and history
Concrete rules — about ourselves, about others, about the way of the world — from a pessimist who, being one, promises no happiness at all but only less pain. A note on the edition: Essays of Schopenhauer is not a book Schopenhauer wrote under that name. It is a selection of chapters from Parerga und Paralipomena (1851) made by the English editor, under a title of the editor's own. The text is Schopenhauer's; the book is not. This is an old English translation, in the public domain. The German original is also in the catalogue, and is what should be cited.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
If my object in these pages were to present a complete scheme of counsels and maxims for the guidance of life, I should have to repeat the numerous rules--some of them excellent--which have been drawn up by thinkers of all ages, from Theognis and Solomon[1] down to La Rochefoucauld; and, in so doing, I should inevitably entail upon the reader a vast amount of well-worn commonplace. But the fact is that in this work I make still less claim to exhaust my subject than in any other of my writings. [Footnote 1: I refer to the proverbs and maxims ascribed, in the Old Testament, to the king of that name.] An author who makes no claims to completeness must also, in a great measure, abandon any attempt at systematic arrangement. For his double loss in this respect, the reader may console himself by reflecting that a complete and systematic treatment of such a subject as the guidance of life could hardly fail to be a very wearisome business. I have simply put down those of my thoughts which appear to be worth communicating--thoughts which, as far as I know, have not been uttered, or, at any rate, not just in the same form, by any one else; so that my remarks may be taken as a supplement to what has been already achieved in the immense field. However, by way of introducing some sort of order into the great variety of matters upon which advice will be given in the following pages, I shall distribute what I have to say under the following heads: (1) general rules; (2) our relation to ourselves; (3) our relation to others; and finally, (4