Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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The word of man is the most durable of all material.
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Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!
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Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
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Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
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Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.
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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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Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place.
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If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.
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Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
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Alles Wollen entspringt aus Bedürfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden.
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It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
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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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The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
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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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A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
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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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...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.
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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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The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
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Der allgemeine Ueberblick zeigt uns, als die beiden Feinde des menschlichen Glückes, den Schmerz und die Langeweile.
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Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.
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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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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.
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The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.