Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world 'God' is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word 'world'.
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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)
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My body and my will are one.
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Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
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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 word of man is the most durable of all material.
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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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...in der ganzen Natur, mit dem Grad der Intelligenz die Fähigkeit zum Schmerze sich steigert, also ebenfalls erst hier ihre höchste Stufe erreicht.
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A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.
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For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
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Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
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The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
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That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.
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The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
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If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
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Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place.
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That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .
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With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.
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Time is that in which all things pass away.
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The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
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The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
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Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
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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.
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The moralists of Europe have pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror.