Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. He was born on the 22nd of February, 1788 in Gdańsk, Poland. Arthur Schopenhauer died on the 21st of September, 1860 in the Free City of Frankfurt.
Below, you will find quotes and sayings by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
80 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
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.
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
Ordinary people merely think how they shall ‘spend’ their time; a man of talent tries to ‘use’ it.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
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.
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
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.
To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
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.
That I could clamber to the frozen moon. And draw the ladder after me.
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
.. that when you’re buying books, you’re optimistically thinking you’re buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner…if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.
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.
Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company.
Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
One should use common words to say uncommon things
Life is a constant process of dying.
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
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.
For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?
Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits 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.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.
Reading is thinking with someone else’s head instead of ones own.
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; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money.
To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
..in the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone..
Truth is most beautiful undraped.
The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.
Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is “Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
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?
.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.
Buying books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man’s personal value is large or small.
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
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.
After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.