Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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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.
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The appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.
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Scoundrels are always sociable.
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The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.
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Die Wahrheit kann warten: denn sie hat ein langes Leben vor sich.
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Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
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This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.
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Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live.
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Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
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Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
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That I could clamber to the frozen moon. And draw the ladder after me.
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One should use common words to say uncommon things.
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Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.
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Die Gegenwart eines Gedankens ist wie die Gegenwart einer Geliebten.
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It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.
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A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.
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Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age.
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If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.
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No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
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No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
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No one can transcend their own individuality.
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Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.
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If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
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Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.