Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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Die Wahrheit kann warten: denn sie hat ein langes Leben vor sich.
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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?
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We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
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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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Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
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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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The eternal being..., as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
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Human existence is an error...it is bad today and every day it gets worse, until the worst happens.
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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.
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First the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.
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A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
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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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A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
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Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
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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.
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The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
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Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.
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Philosophy of religion … really amounts to … philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.
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Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.
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It is most important to allow the brain the full measure of sleep which is required to restore it; for sleep is to a man's whole nature what winding up is to a clock.
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Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
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Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.
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In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.
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Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.