Arthur Schopenhauer (quotes)

Each day is a little life.
Unrest is the mark of existence.
Life without pain has no meaning.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
Time is that in which all things pass away.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
The truth can wait, for it lives a long life.
fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.
Everything that happens, happens of necessity.
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.
One should use common words to say uncommon things
There is something in us that is wiser than our head.
Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.
The present is the only reality and the only certainty.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.
History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.
A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
The eternal being…, as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other
To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.
One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one’s own being.
Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.
All wanting comes from need, therefore from lack, therefore from suffering.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
A happy life is impossible; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
…this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.
The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.
There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.
To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.
You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.
There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom… their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
We call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously.
If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.
The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.
Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else.
Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.
Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.
We grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
…a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.
To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions – but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘either‑or’, and keeps to the concrete.
Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.
The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.
Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
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.
The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.
That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.
The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.
The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.
A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
Because Christian morality leaves animals out of account, they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere ‘things,’ mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
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.

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About Arthur Schopenhauer

Quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer