Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness ... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.
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Where there is no love, a person's faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.
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The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
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In truth the most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.
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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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Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.
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The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
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Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
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Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.
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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.
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Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
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A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.
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The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
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Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life
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Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.
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In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.
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There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
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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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Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
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The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.
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Astrology furnishes a splendid proof of the contemptible subjectivity of men in consequence whereof they refer everything to themselves and from every idea at once go straight back to themselves. Astrology refers the course of celestial bodies to the miserable ego; it also establishes a connection between the comets in heaven and the squabbles and rascalities on earth.
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The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
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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 early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.