Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
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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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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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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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You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
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The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.
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Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.
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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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There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
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To form a judgment intuitively is the privilege of few; authority and example lead the rest of the world. They see with the eyes of others, they hear with the ears of others. Therefore it is very easy to think as all the world now think; but to think as all the world will think thirty years hence is not in the power of every one.
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Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
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Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
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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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Everybody's friend is nobody's.
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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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Wealth as well as sea water. The more we drink, the more thirsty. The so famous.
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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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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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Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
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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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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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Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
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It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.
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To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.