Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

There is an underlying unity in all things

Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence with the certainty of losing it at last.

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.

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.

Education stuffs you full of ideas without the coinciding experience that gave rise to those ideas in the first place, giving you incorrect perspective and notions.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

Each day is a little life every waking and rising a little birth every fresh morning a little youth every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

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

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

(Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects whether moral or intellectual shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late look upon it as the quintessence of life and to a certain extent sacred.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

Fame is something which must be won honour is something which must not be lost.

Genius lives only one storey above madness

We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note.

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

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.

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

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow.

We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

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

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.

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

It will generally be found that as soon the terrors of live reach the point where they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial

Compassion is the basis of morality.

One should use common words to say uncommon things

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

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

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

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

For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it.