Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

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261 Quotes on Talent, Solitude, Compassion, and the Pursuit of Truth

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”

“there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?”

“Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.”

“To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.”

“If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.”

“Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company.”

“What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.”

“Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.”

“Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.”

“To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.”

“That I could clamber to the frozen moon. And draw the ladder after me.”

“After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.”

“Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.”

“Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”

“Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.”

“There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.”

“Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.”

“For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

“Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.”

“Each day is a little life.”

“Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.”

“No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.”

“Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.”

“Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.”

“Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.”

“… a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.”

“Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.”

“Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.”

“Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

“Truth is most beautiful undraped.”

“buying books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.”

“If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.”

“Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West.”

“The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better prepared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas, the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century: if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for, if it does not sound too vain, I might express the opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart, though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case.”

“Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”

“People are often reproached because their desires are directed mainly to money and they are fonder of it than of anything else. Yet it is natural and even inevitable for them to love that which, as an untiring Proteus, is ready at any moment to convert itself into the particular object of our fickle desires and manifold needs. Thus every other blessing can satisfy only one desire and one need; for instance, food is good only to the hungry, wine only for the healthy, medicine for the sick, a fur coat for winter, women for youth, and so on. Consequently, all these are only … relatively good. Money alone is the absolutely good thing because it meets not merely one need in concreto, but needs generally in abstracto.”