“All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.”

Vol. 2, Ch. 14, § 164
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the fo…" by Arthur Schopenhauer?
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Arthur Schopenhauer 261
German philosopher 1788–1860

Related quotes

Morarji Desai photo

“I believe in preventing cruelty to all living beings in any form.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

19th World Vegetarian Congress 1967

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Karl Marx photo

“All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 2, paragraph 20, lines 9-13.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Alfred North Whitehead photo

“There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.”

Source: 1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), Chapter IV, p. 310 https://books.google.com/books?id=uJDEx6rPu1QC&pg=PA310.

Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Laurence Sterne photo
Rudolf Rocker photo

“No thinking man in this day can fail to recognise that one cannot properly evaluate an historical period without considering economic conditions. But much more one-sided is the view which maintains that all history is merely the result of economic conditions, under whose influence all other life phenomena have received form and imprint.
There are thousands of events in history which cannot be explained by purely economic reasons, or by them alone.”

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"
Context: No thinking man in this day can fail to recognise that one cannot properly evaluate an historical period without considering economic conditions. But much more one-sided is the view which maintains that all history is merely the result of economic conditions, under whose influence all other life phenomena have received form and imprint.
There are thousands of events in history which cannot be explained by purely economic reasons, or by them alone. It is quite possible to bring everything within the terms of a definite scheme, but the result is usually not worth the effort. There is scarcely an historical event to whose shaping economic causes have not contributed, but economic forces are not the only motive powers which have set everything else in motion. All social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a rule, can be clearly recognised but cannot be calculated according to scientific methods.

Georg Simmel photo
Antonin Artaud photo
Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 74

Related topics