Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
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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.
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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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Faith is like love, it cannot be forced. Therefore it is a dangerous operation if an attempt be made to introduce or bind it by state regulations; for, as the attempt to force love begets hatred, so also to compel religious belief produces rank unbelief.
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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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Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
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A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
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Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
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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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I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
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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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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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Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
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Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
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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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The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
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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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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 are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.
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The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
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What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.
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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.
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Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?
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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.