Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
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I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
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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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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 no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
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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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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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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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We grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.
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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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The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
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Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.
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Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
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Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
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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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The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
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Sich Alles, was zum leiblichen Wohlseyn beiträgt, zu verschaffen, ist der Zweck seines Lebens. Glücklich genug, wenn dieser ihm viel zu schaffen macht! Denn, sind jene Güter ihm schon zum voraus oktroyirt; so fällt er unausbleiblich der Langenweile anheim.
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The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.
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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.
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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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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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... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
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There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence ... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment.
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That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.