Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.
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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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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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History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.
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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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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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Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
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Wealth as well as sea water. The more we drink, the more thirsty. The so famous.
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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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Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
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Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
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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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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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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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It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.
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Compassion is the basis of morality.
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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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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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Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.
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Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.
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How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?
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Our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.
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The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.