Status Updates From Essays and Aphorisms

“A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts; and this relation will accompany every grade of novel as its characteristic sign, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most action-packed romance. Tristram Shandy, to be sure, has as good as no action whatever; but how very little action there is in La Nouvelle Héloise and…”

[…]

“The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that when we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) Idea of this genus,”

[…]

“…waxwork figures make no aesthetic impression and are consequently not works of art (in the aesthetic sense), although when they are well made they produce a far greater illusion of reality than the best picture or statue can and if imitation of the actual were the aim of art would have to be accorded the first rank. For they seem to present not the pure form but with it the material as well,”

[…]

Schopenhauer was a monarchist 🤮

I can’t get over how illogical Schopenhauer’s argument for polygamy is in his diatribe “On Women.” It’s like he completely forgets that men and women are roughly equal in number. If a man takes two wives, that leaves one man without any. If a man takes fifty wives, forty-nine other men have to do without. Given wealth disparities, polygamy inevitably means that poor men will go without wives and…

[…]

I couldn’t decide which quotes I wanted to post. I’m just going to put the best ones here. (I can’t help grinning reading Schopenhauer.)

[…]