To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
– 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
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
– 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
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
– 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
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed;
third, it is accepted as self-evident.
– 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
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Compassion is the basis of all morality.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the
character of a comedy.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man’s property, it is surely that
which is the result of his mental activity.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
– 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.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other
arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a
letter from them.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly
of snakes.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Most people take the limits of their vision to be the limits of the world. A few do not. Join
them.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Intelligence is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.
– 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
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who
should be thrown out of doors.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s
money. Idiots!
– 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
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and
in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
– 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
Life is short and truth works far and lives long – let us speak the truth.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect,
while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally
accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride
works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this
appreciation indirectly, from without.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can
one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads
the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been
written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one
can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later,
what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a
reproach can treat it with contempt.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a
truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
– 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
For our improvement we need a mirror.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of
fame.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where
every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom
or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end
mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to
excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of
possessions.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The
pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don’t believe it, compare the
respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
– 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 wilful 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. A sensible man will be generous in the use of it… Wax, a substance naturally hard and
brittle, can be made soft by the application of a little warmth, so that it will take any shape
you please. In the same way, by being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and
obliging, even though they are apt to be crabbed and malevolent. Hence politeness is to
human nature what warmth is to wax.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.
– 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
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the
philosopher.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome – to be got
over.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity
and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all
are right.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount,
is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in
talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old
age: we are languid, talkative, silly. 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.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners,
and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
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.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our
control.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.
– 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
One should use common words to say uncommon things.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on
the altar of monogamy?
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The word of man is the most durable of all material.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the
impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer’s mind
without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he
is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got
from the thing itself.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they
shall think.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but
fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
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.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
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.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for
those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Money is never spent to so much advantage as when you have been cheated out of it; for
at one stroke you have purchased prudence.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the
material and the limit of our consideration.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying
human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the
resurrection.
– Arthur Schopenhauer