Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.
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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.
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The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
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The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.
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Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
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Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
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True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
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Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
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Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
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A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.
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To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
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Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
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It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
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The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.
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To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.
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It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.
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To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.
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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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Genius is an intellect that has become unfaithful to its destiny.
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Man may have the most excellent judgment in all other matters, and yet go wrong in those which concern himself; because here the will comes in and deranges the intellect at once. Therefore let a man take counsel of a friend. A doctor can cure everyone but himself; if he falls ill, he sends for a colleague.
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If a relationship is perfectly natural there will be a complete fusion of the happiness of both of you-owing to fellow-feeling and various other laws which govern our natures, this is, quite simply, the greatest happiness that can exist.
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Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
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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?
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The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.