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Arthur Schopenhauer

German philosopher (1788-1860)

  • Fame80.5
  • Momentum0.3
  • Academics rank#46
Source-basedStable
  • Fame80.5
  • Momentum0.3
  • Academics rank#46
  • Wikipedia148.2K
Lived 1788–1860, aged 72
AcademicsAcademic
  • Wikipedia
    111 languages
    Cross-language footprint
  • Era
    1788–1860
    Aged 72
Summary
Updated 2026-06-19

He argued that reality is the thrashing of a blind, irrational will — and that recognizing this truth leads straight to pessimism. Schopenhauer's 1818 system broke with German idealism, drew on Indian philosophy, and spent most of his life ignored before it reshaped aesthetics, ethics, and how the West thought about suffering.

Biography

About

Arthur Schopenhauer was born 22 February 1788 in Germany and published The World as Will and Representation in 1818, expanded in 1844. Building on Kant's transcendental idealism, he proposed an atheistic metaphysics: the phenomenal world is the manifestation of a blind, irrational noumenal will. He rejected the German idealism dominant around him and became one of the first Western philosophers to affirm tenets of Indian philosophy — asceticism, denial of the self, the world-as-appearance. His work exemplified philosophical pessimism. It drew little attention while he lived, but after his deat…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer
said
The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here.
— :s:The World as Will and Representation/Preface to the First Edition
Arthur Schopenhauer
said
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that distinguishes the philosopher.
— Letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (November 1815)
Arthur Schopenhauer
saidundated
The New Testament … must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism, and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian.
— quoted in The Circle of Memory_ An Autobiography - Subhash Kak
Arthur Schopenhauer
saidundated
Think of the fanaticism, the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no conception!
— Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)
Arthur Schopenhauer
saidundated
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
— As attributed in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 624
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
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By the numbers

Score breakdown

The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.

Fame
Stable
80.5
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Momentum0.3
Historical29.3
Now attention10.3
Source confidence65.0
Completeness65.0
Global rank
—
Country rank
—
Category rank
#46
Receipts

Sources