Arthur Schopenhauer > Quotes

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga Und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften, Volume 1

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Life without pain has no meaning.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if hes does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice... That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

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

“It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Wisdom of Life and Counsels and

“Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”
― 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 in the only guarantee of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”
― 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

“We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts , the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

“Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability. ”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. – A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think. ”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“the world is my idea”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts. ”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax. ”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties”
― 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

“What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Music is the melody whose text is the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“[T]he appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Authors can be divided into meteors, planets and fixed stars. The meteors produce a loud momentary effect; we look up, shout 'see there!' and then they are gone for ever. The planets and comets last for a much longer time....The fixed stars alone are constant and unalterable; their position in the firmament is fixed; they have their own light and are at all times active, because they do not alter their appearance through a change in our standpoint, for they have no parallax. Unlike the others, they do not belong to one system (nation) alone, but to the world. But just because they are situated so high, their light usually requires many years before it becomes visible to the inhabitatns of earth.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer