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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Animals learn death first at the moment of death;...man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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?
Arthur Schopenhauer -
There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
For our improvement we need a mirror.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
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, 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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!
Arthur Schopenhauer -
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer