Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.


If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.


Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.


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




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.


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


The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity, for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.


Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.


The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arise from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.




The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Man shows his character best in trifles.


There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.




Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation can make up for the want of natural abilities.


Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.


Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the business man.




The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ...





The first rule, indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say.


A man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.


(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.


Pride is the direct appreciation of oneself.


Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?


Human life must be some form of mistake.


If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.


Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.


Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own.




Reasonable and vicious are quite consistent with each other, in fact, only through their union are great and far-reaching crimes possible.



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





Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging.

There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.


To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake.


Time is that in which all things pass away.




Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.





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.

Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.


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.






The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering, from positive evil.

It is in trifles, and when he is off his guard, that a man best shows his character.


To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.


A word too much always defeats its purpose.


We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others; the latter are the rule, the former the exception. Only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.


What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has or, fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.




We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.

The little honesty existing among authors is to be seen in the outrageous way in which they misquote from the writings of others.


The weakness of their reasoning faculty also explains why women show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men; . . . and why, on the contrary, they are inferior to men as regards justice, and less honourable and conscientious.




Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

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


Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately.


Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.


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




The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.

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


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.


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

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.




Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

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

Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.




Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.



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.

Pride ... is the direct appreciation of oneself.


Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.


Genius is to other gifts what the carbuncle is to the precious stones. It sends forth its own light, whereas other stones only reflect borrowed light.


Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.





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


The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.


The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.


The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.


Money is human happiness in the abstract.


Compassion is the basis of all morality.


I observed once to Goethe ... that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself."





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