Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
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To read a book is to hold an entire world in the palm of your hand. That world is unique to you; no two readers can ever inhabit the same world.
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What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
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That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.
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Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
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Every new born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. It's fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are one being.
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Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious... and consequently the concentration of all desire.
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Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.
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The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.
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There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
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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.
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The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
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A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.
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Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.
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I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
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The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
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A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.
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What a man can do and suffer is unknown to himself till some occasion presents itself which draws out the hidden power. Just as one sees not in the water of an unruffled pond the fury and roar with which it can dash down a steep rock without injury to itself, or how high it is capable of rising; or as little as one can suspect the latent heat in ice-cold water.
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Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
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Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging.
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The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it.
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We should comfort ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages-stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.
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Truth is most beautiful undraped.
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The little incidents and accidents of every day fill us with emotion, anxiety, annoyance, passion, as long as they are close to us, when they appear so big, so important, so serious; but as soon as they are borne down the restless stream of time they lose what significance they had; we think no more of them and soon forget them altogether. They were big only because they were near.