Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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The appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.
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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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Consciousness makes the individual careful to maintain his own existence; and if this were not so, there would be no surety for the preservation of the species. From all this it is clear that individuality is not a form of perfection, but rather a limitation; and so to be freed from it is not loss but gain.
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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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The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.
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Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.
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There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. ... The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.
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Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.
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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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Die Wahrheit kann warten: denn sie hat ein langes Leben vor sich.
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Zu unserer Besserung bedürfen wir eines Spiegels.
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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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Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into.
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What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
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Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.
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Die Gegenwart eines Gedankens ist wie die Gegenwart einer Geliebten.
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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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Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
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If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.
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Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
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Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
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Unrest is the mark of existence.
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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.
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No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.