"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 being self-evident."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure"
— 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

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Compassion is the basis of morality."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"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

"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Life without pain has no meaning."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

"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

"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 (The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims)

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

"the world is my idea"
— 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

"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 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

"Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability. "
— Arthur Schopenhauer (Essays and Aphorisms)

"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)

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. "
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish"
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
— 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

"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 a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others."
— 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

"talent hits the mark no one else can, genius hits the mark no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Compassion is the basis of morality."
— 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

"Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain."
— Arthur Schopenhauer (Essays and Aphorisms)

"Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
— Arthur Schopenhauer (The Works of Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays)

"What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation."
— Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, 1 of 2)

"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)

"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

"And yet, just as our body would burst asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere were removed from it, so would the arrogance of men expand, if not to the point of bursting then to that of the most unbridled folly, indeed madness, if the pressure of want, toil, calamity and frustration were removed from their life. One can even say that we require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, in order to keep on a straight course."
— Arthur Schopenhauer (Essays and Aphorisms)

"Music is the melody whose text is the world."
— 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

"Alles Urdenken geschieht in Bildern: darum ist die Phantasie ein so nothwendiges Werkzeug desselben, und werden phantasielose Köpfe nie etwas Großes leisten, - es sei denn in der Mathematik."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit;
Genius hits a target no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax. "
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.
"
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident"
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as self-evident."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
— Arthur Schopenhauer