Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

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Reasonable and vicious are quite consistent with each other, in fact, only through their union are great and far-reaching crimes possible

Arthur Schopenhauer
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.

Arthur Schopenhauer
To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.

Arthur Schopenhauer
In order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.

Arthur Schopenhauer
To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.

Arthur Schopenhauer
In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

Arthur Schopenhauer
In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts.

Arthur Schopenhauer
With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?

Arthur Schopenhauer
To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

Arthur Schopenhauer
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man becomes a philosopher by reason of a certain perplexity, from which he seeks to free himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer
One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.

Arthur Schopenhauer
All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany, then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.

Arthur Schopenhauer
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.

Arthur Schopenhauer
What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer
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.

Arthur Schopenhauer
No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Consider that chance, which, with error, its brother, and folly, its aunt, and malice, its grandmother, rules in this world; which every year and every day, by blows great and small, embitters the life of every son of earth, and yours too.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.

Arthur Schopenhauer