Arthur Schopenhauer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer on Wise Famous Quotes.

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

In many cases hate a person is rooted in the involuntary estimate of its virtues.

Every light can be extinguished. The intellect is a light. Therefore it can, be extinguished.

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them
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Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.

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

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

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

... a hundred fools together will not make one wise man.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

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

In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.

Spanish proverb: honor and money are not to be found in the same purse.

To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man

The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.

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

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

Everybody's friend is nobody's.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.

To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.

Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.

Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

Every nation mocks other nations. And all are right.

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

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.

Life without pain has no meaning.

If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.

A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name

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

Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.

Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.

To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.

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

You can also look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

She has tender feet, for she walks not on the hard earth, but treads on the heads of men

If we are distracted and read thoughtlessly, and then realize that we have indeed taken in all the words, but no concepts.

What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.

The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming.

Genius lives only one storey above madness

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

If there is anything in the world that can really be called a mans property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.

That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has never been.

All religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.

At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.

As Epictetus says, Men are not influenced by things, but by their thoughts about things.

Our memory of joys and sorrows is always imperfect, and they become a matter of indifference to us as soon as they are over.

Life is a business that does not cover the costs.

Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.

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

The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.

In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met ...

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

In the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone.

It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable.

Man shows his character best in trifles.

The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.

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

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom ... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.

The conviction is well founded, which the sight of noble conduct calls forth, that the spirit of love ... can never pass away and become nothing.

Where there is no love, a person's faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.

The truth can wait, for it lives a long life.

You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

Music is so easy to explain, yet so inexplicable, as it reproduces all the emotions of our inner being without reality, remote from pain.

Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.

The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.

A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.

Time is that in which all things pass away.

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.

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

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.

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

[T]he appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.

That when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

The differences which come under the first head are those which Nature herself has set between man and man;

He who has lost all hope has also lost all fear;

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.

Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.