Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.
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Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
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In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
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If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?
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Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.
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No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.
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Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
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In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.
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We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
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The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.
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All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.
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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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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.
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Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.
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Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.
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Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.
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Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
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It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.
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Die Gegenwart eines Gedankens ist wie die Gegenwart einer Geliebten.
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Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
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Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
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Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
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Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
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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.