Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

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

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

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

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

Arthur Schopenhauer