Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Alles Wollen entspringt aus Bedürfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden.
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The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
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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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Women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.
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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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A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
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Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
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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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With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
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Every truth passes through 3 stages before it is recognized 1)ridicule 2) opposition 3) accepted as self-evident.
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The beard, being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police - It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.
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Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
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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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Der allgemeine Ueberblick zeigt uns, als die beiden Feinde des menschlichen Glückes, den Schmerz und die Langeweile.
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Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
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What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
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All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
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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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Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.
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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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We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
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As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
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He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?