Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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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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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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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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The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.
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The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
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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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Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.
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... deshalb ich diese als die Metaphysik des Volkes bezeichnet habe.
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A happy life is impossible; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
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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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Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
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The truth can wait, for it lives a long life.
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If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
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It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
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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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Die Wahrheit kann warten: denn sie hat ein langes Leben vor sich.
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The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.
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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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It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
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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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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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Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.
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The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
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Philosophy of religion … really amounts to … philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.