Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.
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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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We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
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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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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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History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.
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The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it.
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Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
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For our improvement we need a mirror.
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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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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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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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Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
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It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.
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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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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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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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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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Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
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Genius is to other gifts what the carbuncle is to the precious stones. It sends forth its own light, whereas other stones only reflect borrowed light.
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Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
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Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
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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.