Everyone you meet on here has read themselves stupid

>"When we read, someone else thinks for us; we repeat merely his mental process. It is like the pupil who, when learning to write, goes over with his pen the strokes made in pencil by the teacher. Accordingly, when we read, the work of thinking is for the most part taken away from us. Hence the noticeable relief when from preoccupation with our thoughts we pass to reading. But while we are reading our mind is really only the playground of other people’s ideas; and when these finally depart, what remains? The result is that, whoever reads very much and almost the entire day but at intervals amuses himself with thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who always rides ultimately forgets how to walk. But such is the case with very many scholars; they have read themselves stupid. For constant reading, which is at once resumed at every free moment, is even more paralysing to the mind than is manual work; for with the latter we can give free play to our own thoughts. Just as a spring finally loses its elasticity through the constant pressure of a foreign body, so does the mind through the continual pressure of other people’s ideas. Just as we upset the stomach by too much food and thereby do harm to the whole body, so can we cram and strangle the mind by too much mental pabulum. For the more we read, the fewer the traces that are left behind in the mind by what has been read. It becomes like a blackboard whereon many things have been written over one another. Hence we never come to ruminate;* but only through this do we assimilate what we have read, just as food nourishes us not by being eaten but by being digested."

Don't let Schopenhauer think for you, user.

fukken pwnt

no, they haven’t even gotten that far, they’re just stupid

>frogposter

God we must be the most intelligent since nobody here actually fucking reads

That's why you should read slowly, giving yourself time to digest and properly question what's in front of you, don't silence yourself, better yet, write.

It's amazing how Veeky Forums takes the written word of their heroes and shapes their ideologies around them instead of creating their own.

He makes a very good point, which is frequently and, probably, deliberately misunderstood by people like Or was that an attempt at a joke?
Anyway, it's impossible for a human mind to be truly "independent" in thought; that's irrelevant.

What an incredibly fucking stupid outlook.
Your issue is with people that read one book and map that out onto all thought, like a mathematician that tries to solve everything with one formula.
The key is to read enough that you can use the knowledge gained as tools to further your own thought.
You wouldn't make a math student reconstruct a formula from scratch when you could just show him the one that was already invented, would you?

this is why I only read the few first pages and then teh last few pages of a book, in order to not waste time

Really want to think? Go play Dota. Misanthropy will be an unfortunate side effect though.

>dying games

What is dota allowing you to think about? Agree about the misanthropy I play league

>s a man who always rides ultimately forgets how to walk
every time

>vidya

that's a stupid fucking image

Competitive multiplayer games frustrate even the most stoic among men.

Stupid how? I think it's very pretty.

It's almost as if Schopenhauer is being ironic with his choice of a blatantly ridiculous analogy in this book of his, were he is arguing that reading books is for retards, which he probably wrote in his massive personal library.

It's almost as if you really are retarded if you think that's the point he's making.

He is criticising academics, those that read too much, lit doesn't have such a demographic, we're all young on here for starters. Secondly this analogy is perfectly fine and the passage is not ironic.

Didn't Aristotle say something about entertaining a thought without accepting it; is the difference between a retard like OP, and a genius like myself?

>the thousands of opinions and poorly thought out arguments you're exposed to on Veeky Forums don't have the same effect
I know you're joking around, but think about it, we're probably reading ourselves even more stupid

Idk but there was a quote I remember reading that went along the lines of "the mark of a mature intellect is the capacity to hold two conflicting ideas in ones understanding bla bla" something like that