Revisiting Schopenhauer, after a short pause for Reflexion and Reading what's been said about him since he died (1860)

Whatever else you may think about Arthur Schopenhauer--and you're free to think any damned thing you want--you've got to remember that his mother knew him first, knew him best, and probably said it first--and she was a helluva woman: among other things,  a best-selling novelist, a Saloniste whose Salon included Goethe, the Schlegel brothers, Grimm, Wieland and Tieck, and a damned fine, interesting and honorable character in her own right.  So, you may figure, that when Johanna Schopenhauer said to her son, in a letter, that she could tell him things, about the French invasion of Weimar, "that would make  your hair stand on end," but that she refrained, "for I know how you love to brood on human misery in any case," she had touched on something which those of us who love her son's philosophy might take into account as true and characteristic of it.

Not only was she not stupid, she was the one who urged her son Arthur, when he was 19 years old, to give up business for university studies--which, I think, no mother in the history of the world had done before.