Aging & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Indoctrination’s secret weapon, Schopenhauer suggests, isn’t persuasion but timing: get to the mind before it has defenses, then dress nonsense in ceremony until it hardens into “sense.” The line is built like a cynical recipe. “Absurdity so palpable” implies the falsehood is not merely debatable but obvious, the kind you could point to with a finger. Yet it can still be “firmly planted,” a botanical metaphor that makes belief feel less like a choice than like cultivated growth. The kicker is procedural: start before five, repeat constantly, and maintain “great solemnity.” Truth becomes secondary to tone.

His intent is less to diagnose individual gullibility than to expose a social technology. Childhood isn’t romantic here; it’s a vulnerability window. Schopenhauer is also taking a swipe at institutions that rely on early, repetitive ritual: religion, patriotism, propriety, even family mythologies. The subtext is that what we call conviction is often a residue of training, and that adults mistake familiarity for validity. Solemnity functions as a credibility costume; if you can’t supply evidence, you supply gravitas.

Context matters: Schopenhauer wrote in a Europe where church catechism, nationalist formation, and rigid social hierarchies were stitched into everyday life. His broader philosophy is famously bleak about human rationality and motives, and this sentence is that bleakness sharpened into a social observation: reason arrives late, after the mind’s furniture has already been installed. The wit is cruel but effective because it targets the mechanism, not the target. It’s not “people are stupid”; it’s “belief is manufactured.”