Arthur Schopenhauer: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”

“If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner… if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.”

“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”

“The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.”

“the world is my idea”

“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”

“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.”

“If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”

“Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.”

“Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.”

“It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.”

“He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.”

“To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.”

“The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”

“We seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack.”

“I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.”

“What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others…”