Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

“All our wanting comes from needs, thus we continiously suffer. The intellect teaches free will, free from suffering.”

“Although as a rule the absurd culminates, and it seems impossible for the voice of the individual ever to penetrate through the chorus of foolers and fooled, still there is left to the genuine works of all times a quite peculiar, silent, slow, and powerful influence; and as if by a miracle, we see them rise at last out of the turmoil like a balloon that floats up out of the thick atmosphere of this globe into purer regions. Having once arrived there, it remains at rest, and no one can any longer draw it down again.”

“To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.”

“It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.”

“If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.”

“The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.”

“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.”

“Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.”

“The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.”

“Women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.”

“I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.”

“Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.”

“There is no vice of which a man can be guilty, no meanness, no shabbiness, no unkindness, which excites so much indignation among his contemporaries, friends and neighbours, as his success. This is the one unpardonable crime, which reason cannot defend, nor humility mitigate.”

“Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.”

“Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.”

“There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.”

“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.”

“Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.”

“A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.”

“The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.”

“Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.”

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”

“It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.”

“The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.”

“Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.”