Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
-
Every truth passes through 3 stages before it is recognized 1)ridicule 2) opposition 3) accepted as self-evident.
-
What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others.
-
Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
-
The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
-
The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
-
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
-
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
-
Der Philister … ist demnach ein Mensch ohne geistige Bedürfnisse. Hieraus nun folgt gar mancherlei: erstlich, in Hinsicht auf ihn selbst, daß er ohne geistige Genüsse bleibt; nach dem schon erwähnten Grundsatz: il n’est pas de vrais plaisirs qu’avec de vrais besoins.
-
Der allgemeine Ueberblick zeigt uns, als die beiden Feinde des menschlichen Glückes, den Schmerz und die Langeweile.
-
Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.
-
Alles Wollen entspringt aus Bedürfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden.
-
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.
-
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.
-
This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.
-
The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.
-
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
-
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.