Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

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The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
To Christoph Martin Wieland in April 1811

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
That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

Arthur Schopenhauer
In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel's, Herbart's and Schleiermacher's complete philosophical works.

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
If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

Arthur Schopenhauer
All wanting comes from need, therefore from lack, therefore from suffering.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Arthur Schopenhauer
To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The progress of life shows a man the stuff of which he is made.

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.

Arthur Schopenhauer
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

Arthur Schopenhauer
To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it. Then give up deceiving people; confess ignorance of what you don't know, and leave everyone to form his own articles of faith for himself. Perhaps they won't turn out so bad, especially as they'll rub one another's corners down, and mutually rectify mistakes. The existence of many views will at any rate lay a foundation of tolerance. Those who possess knowledge and capacity may betake themselves to the study of philosophy, or even in their own persons carry the history of philosophy a step further.

Arthur Schopenhauer
For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
Our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

Arthur Schopenhauer