Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

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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
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 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
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
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
I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.

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

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.

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
The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

Arthur Schopenhauer
That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous.... Photography … offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.

Arthur Schopenhauer
There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to become

Arthur Schopenhauer
Only the male intellect, clouded by sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex.

Arthur Schopenhauer
No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

Arthur Schopenhauer
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.

Arthur Schopenhauer
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Arthur Schopenhauer
It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.

Arthur Schopenhauer
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

Arthur Schopenhauer