Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

“The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly hamonized; it is true to life.”

“It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.”

“There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.”

“The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.”

“Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.”

“Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.”

“The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.”

“Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.”

“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.”

“In truth the most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.”

“The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.”

“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.”

“The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime.”

“Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.”

“Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.”

“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.”

“A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.”

“The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.”

“The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.”

“Truth is most beautiful undraped.”

“Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.”

“To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.”

“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

“I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.”

“Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.”