Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

360 Sourced Quotes

I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The whole of experience is like a secret code; philosophy deciphers this code, and it proves its accuracy through the coherence that emerges everywhere out of this.
In German: Das Ganze der Erfahrung gleicht einer Geheimschrift und die Philosophie der Entzifferung derselben.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.

Arthur Schopenhauer
To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.

Arthur Schopenhauer
What people commonly call Fate is, as a general rule, nothing but their own stupid and foolish conduct.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.

Arthur Schopenhauer
We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life

Arthur Schopenhauer
To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy.

Arthur Schopenhauer
For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms; they shine only when it is dark.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.

Arthur Schopenhauer
I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.

Arthur Schopenhauer
For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.

Arthur Schopenhauer
It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself.... Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Rudeness is better than any argument; it totally eclipses intellect.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging.

Arthur Schopenhauer
He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.

Arthur Schopenhauer
I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.

Arthur Schopenhauer
It is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nurishes the wish;

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.

Arthur Schopenhauer
True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer