Essays of Schopenhauer

This is why simplicity has always been looked upon as a token, not only of truth, but also of genius.

However, the public is very much more interested in matter than in form, and it is for this very reason that it is behindhand in any high degree of culture

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.

How learned many a man would be if he knew everything that was in his own books!

The extraordinarily active zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by the Bible or by any valid reasons

Christianity's inmost truth is that suffering (the Cross) is the real purpose of life; hence it condemns suicide as thwarting this end, while the ancients, from a lower point of view, approved of it, nay, honoured it.

Is Hamlet's monologue the meditation of a criminal? He merely states that considering the nature of the world, death would be certainly preferable, if we were sure that by it we should be annihilated

Aristotle says "Suicide is a wrong against the State, although not against the person;"

We are told that suicide is an act of the greatest cowardice, that it is only possible to a madman, and other absurdities of a similar nature; or they make use of the perfectly senseless expression that it is "wrong," while it is perfectly clear that no one has such indisputable right over anything in the world as over his own person and life.

As far as I can see, it is only the followers of monotheistic, that is of Jewish, religions that regard suicide as a crime.