-
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach.
Arthur Schopenhauer
-
Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.
Arthur Schopenhauer
-
The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
-
The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.
Arthur Schopenhauer
-
To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.
Arthur Schopenhauer