The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to… - Arthur Schopenhauer
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The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.
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About
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher, most famous for his work The World as Will and Representation (1819).
Biography information from
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Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Johann Schäfer (Public domain / CC0)
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
