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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Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
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Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
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We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
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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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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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The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it.
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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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It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.
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Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
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Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
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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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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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There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
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It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.
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In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.
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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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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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Everybody's friend is nobody's.
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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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Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
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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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Faith is like love, it cannot be forced. Therefore it is a dangerous operation if an attempt be made to introduce or bind it by state regulations; for, as the attempt to force love begets hatred, so also to compel religious belief produces rank unbelief.
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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.