Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author’s thoughts. The value of these thoughts lies either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form in which he develops his matter — that is to say, what he has thought about it.
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Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest.
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The brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.
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One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
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There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
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The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it.
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It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.
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Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.
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There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.
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Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
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A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.
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The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
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If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
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Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.
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When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.
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Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
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Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
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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 man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
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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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You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
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Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.
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Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.
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The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.