Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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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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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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Meistens belehrt uns erst der Verlust über den Wert der Dinge.
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All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.
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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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There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
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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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It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
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That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!
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Truth is most beautiful undraped.
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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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The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists - Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.
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He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
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To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.
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Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.
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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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If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
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Reasonable and vicious are quite consistent with each other, in fact, only through their union are great and far-reaching crimes possible.
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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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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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I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
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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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To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
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History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.