“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
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Arthur Schopenhauer 261
German philosopher 1788–1860Related quotes
“Life is like that. You live it forward but understand it backward.”
Variant: You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Source: Cutting for Stone
“Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.”
The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field: The love affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896), Ch. IV : The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me, p. 44
Context: Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.
WTF Is…? series, Day One: Garry's Incident (October 1, 2013)
Lee Krasner, Marcia Tucker, Whitney Museum of American Art (1973) Lee Krasner: large paintings. Nr. 33. p. 8.
Anarchist Morality http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/AM/anarchist_moralitytc.html (1890)
Context: The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested — rulers, lawyers, clerics — have carefully enwound her.
She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences.
But the inveterate enemies of thought — the government, the lawgiver, and the priest — soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs.
