Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

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Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Arthur Schopenhauer
[...] all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial.
Sometimes misquoted as: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer
National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Arthur Schopenhauer
There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no vice, of which a man can be guilty, no meanness, no shabbiness, no unkindness, which excited so much indignation among his contemporaries, friends and neighbors, as his success. This is the one unpardonable crime, which reason cannot defend, nor [can] humility mitigate.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

Arthur Schopenhauer
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

Arthur Schopenhauer
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

Arthur Schopenhauer
It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer

Arthur Schopenhauer
This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

Arthur Schopenhauer
In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met...

Arthur Schopenhauer
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Philosophy … is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

Arthur Schopenhauer
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Arthur Schopenhauer
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man's body and the needs of his body are now everywhere treated with a tender indulgence. Is the thinking mind then, to be the only thing that is never to obtain the slightest measure of consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect?

Arthur Schopenhauer
Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

Arthur Schopenhauer
There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
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.

Arthur Schopenhauer