Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

360 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.

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

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

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

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no vice, of which a man can be guilty, no meanness, no shabbiness, no unkindness, which excited so much indignation among his contemporaries, friends and neighbors, as his success. This is the one unpardonable crime, which reason cannot defend, nor [can] humility mitigate.

Arthur Schopenhauer
For our improvement we need a mirror.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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