Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

“No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.”

“Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.”

“History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.”

“The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.”

“Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into”

“The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”

“NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life. preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation”

“I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.”

“The reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment.”

“If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?”

“The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.”

“What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.”

“Motives are causes experienced from within.”

“To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.”

“Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.”

“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.”

“If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid”

“It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.”

“A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.”

“Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.”

“If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.”

“For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.”

“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”

“Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.”

“For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”