Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

360 Sourced Quotes

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A man's body and the needs of his body are now everywhere treated with a tender indulgence. Is the thinking mind then, to be the only thing that is never to obtain the slightest measure of consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect?

Arthur Schopenhauer
Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

Arthur Schopenhauer
If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

Arthur Schopenhauer
For what is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with vile envy, a man seeks to beg pardon for his excellences and merits from those who have none? For whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.

Arthur Schopenhauer
It may be said that religion is the chef d'oeuvre of the art of training, because it trains people in the way that shall think: and, as is well known, you cannot begin the process too early.

Arthur Schopenhauer
We take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Pride is an established conviction of one's own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.

Arthur Schopenhauer
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Arthur Schopenhauer
If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.

Arthur Schopenhauer
[People] are like sheep following the bell-wether just as he leads them. They would sooner die than think.

Arthur Schopenhauer
There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

Arthur Schopenhauer
A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

Arthur Schopenhauer
I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.

Arthur Schopenhauer
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