Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

465. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

467. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

469. “Whoever attaches great importance to the opinions of people pays them too much honour.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

478. “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

479. “Authority and example lead the world.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

481. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

483. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

485. “At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

491. “All striving comes from lack, from a dissatisfaction with one’s condition, and is thus suffering as long as it is not satisfied; but no satisfaction is lasting; instead, it is only the beginning of a new striving. We see striving everywhere inhibited in many ways, struggling everywhere; and thus always suffering; there is no final goal of striving, and therefore no bounds or end to suffering.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

492. “Man shows his character best in trifles.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

493. “Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

494. “The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly hamonized; it is true to life.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

495. “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

496. “Our greatest sufferings do not lie in the present, as intuitive representations or immediate feeling, but rather in reason, as abstract concepts, tormenting thoughts.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

497. “Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

499. “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

500. “It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer