Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
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At the age of five years to enter a spinning-cotton or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labour, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analogous to it.
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Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
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The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending.
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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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One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.
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Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
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Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.
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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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Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
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We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
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Alles Wollen entspringt aus Bedürfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden.
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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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Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
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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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Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
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If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.
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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
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Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
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Je weniger einer, in Folge objektiver oder subjektiver Bedingungen, nötig hat, mit den Menschen in Berührung zu kommen, desto besser ist er daran.
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Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
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I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.
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A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
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To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn't.