Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

360 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.

Arthur Schopenhauer
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?

Arthur Schopenhauer
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

Arthur Schopenhauer
He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?

Arthur Schopenhauer
I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Dogma is intended for, and suited to, the great mass of the human race; and as such it can contain merely allegorical truth that it nevertheless has to pass off as truth sensu proprio [in the proper sense].

Arthur Schopenhauer
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.

Arthur Schopenhauer
If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer's mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.

Arthur Schopenhauer