Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
-
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
-
Ueberhaupt aber bin ich allmälig der Meinung geworden, daß der erwähnte Nutzen der Kathederphilosophie von dem Nachtheil überwogen werde, den die Philosophie als Profession der Philosophie als freier Wahrheitsforschung, oder die Philosophie im Auftrage der Regierung der Philosophie im Auftrage der Natur und der Menschheit bringt.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
-
Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
-
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
-
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.
-
We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
-
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.
-
In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel's, Herbart's and Schleiermacher's complete philosophical works. - vol. II, p. 582 (as cited on p. 177 of Schopenhauer: A Biography)
-
No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
-
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
-
Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
-
Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.
-
The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
-
A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.
-
Je weniger einer, in Folge objektiver oder subjektiver Bedingungen, nötig hat, mit den Menschen in Berührung zu kommen, desto besser ist er daran.