Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.
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The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.
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Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.
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It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
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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.
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I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
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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.
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There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.
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Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
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A man’s body and the needs of his body are now everywhere treated with a tender indulgence. Is the thinking mind then, to be the only thing that is never to obtain the slightest measure of consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect?
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When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.
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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.
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Ball, Theater, Gesellschaft, Kartenspiel, Hasardspiel, Pferde, Weiber, Trinken, Reisen, … reicht dies Alles gegen die Langeweile nicht aus, wo Mangel an geistigen Bedürfnissen die geistigen Genüsse unmöglich macht. Daher auch ist dem Philister ein dumpfer, trockener Ernst, der sich dem thierischen nähert, eigen und charakteristisch.
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I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
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We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
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Das Bedenkliche bei der Sache ist auch bloß die doch einzuräumende Möglichkeit, daß die letzte dem Menschen erreichbare Einsicht in die Natur der Dinge, in sein eigenes Wesen und das der Welt nicht gerade zusammenträfe mit den Lehren, welche theils dem ehemaligen Völkchen der Juden eröffnet worden, theils vor 1800 Jahren in Jerusalem aufgetreten sind.
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Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.
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Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.
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Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.
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The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.
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Rascals are always sociable - more’s the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company.
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We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
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It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.
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Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.