Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness: they are in Pope’s words: For ever reading, never to be read.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

452. “Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

453. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

455. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

456. “In general, however, grand opera, by more and more deadening our musical receptivity through its three-hours duration and at the same time putting our patience to the test through the snail’s pace of what is usually a very trite action, is in itself intrinsically and essentially boring; which failing can be overcome only by the excessive excellence of an individual achievement: that is why in this genre only the masterpieces are enjoyable and everything mediocre is unendurable.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

457. “A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

458. “Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

459. “Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

460. “Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

461. “That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

462. “Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

463. “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

464. “I love looking at famous people. Because of the way they look. Because of the way photography makes them look famous.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

465. “JedeTrennung gibt einenVorgeschmack desTodesund jedes Wiedersehen einenVorgeschmack der Auferstehung. Every parting is a foretaste of death, and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

466. “A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

467. “There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

468. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

469. “First the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

471. “Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

472. “The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

473. “To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

474. “Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

476. “Belief is like love: it cannot be compelled; and as any attempt to compel love produces hate, so it is the attempt to compel belief which first produces real unbelief.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

477. “What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

478. “Life is a stage where the worst actor plays the king while the best actor the beggar.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

479. “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

480. “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

481. “All happiness is of a negative rather than positive nature, and for this reason cannot give lasting satisfaction and gratification, but rather only ever a release from a pain or lack, which must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty yearning and boredom.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

482. “It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

483. “When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip unnapreciated and unenjoyed by was their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

484. “He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

485. “I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

486. “Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

487. “It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

488. “Whoever wants his judgment to be believed, should express it coolly and dispassionately; for all vehemence springs from the will. And so the judgment might be attributed to the will and not to knowledge, which by its nature is cold.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

489. “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

490. “A man’s face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man’s thoughts and aspirations.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

491. “The word of man is the most durable of all material.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

492. “Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

493. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

494. “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

495. “Virtue is as little taught as is genius; indeed, the concept is just as unfruitful for it as it is for art, and in the case of both can be used only as an instrument. We should therefore be just as foolish to expect that our moral systems and ethics would create virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics would produce poets, painters, and musicians.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

496. “A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

497. “Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

498. “Many books 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...”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

499. “Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

500. “That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has never been.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer