Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

152. “Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

153. “Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

154. “In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

155. “Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

156. “Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

157. “Sociability belongs to the most dangerous, even destructive inclinations, since it brings us into contact with beings the great majority of whom are morally bad and intellectually dull or perverted.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

158. “Knowledge is to certain extent a second existence.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

159. “It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

160. “He who has lost all hope has also lost all fear;.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

161. “Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

162. “The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud;.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

163. “To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

164. “Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

165. “Der Mensch kann wohl tun was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen was er will.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

166. “I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Featured in: Reading Quotes

167. “There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

168. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

170. “Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

172. “Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

173. “How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity! –.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

174. “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

175. “Society is in this respect like a fire-the wise man warming himself at a proper distance from it; not coming too close, like the fool, who, on getting scorched, runs away and shivers in solitude, loud in his complaint that the fire burns.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

176. “He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch, arise directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not himself confirmed.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

177. “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

178. “History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

179. “Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn’t deserve your affection.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

180. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

181. “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.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

182. “If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

183. “No child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy, religion, or any other branch of knowledge where it is necessary to take large views; because wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

184. “The only certain rule is the one that Aristotle already gave: do not dispute with anyone and everyone, but only with those people you know who are intelligent enough to avoid saying things that are so stupid as to expose themselves to humiliation, who appreciate the truth, and who gladly listen to good reasons, even when the opponent claims them, and who are balanced enough to bear a defeat when the truth is on the other side.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

185. “Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

186. “Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

187. “Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

188. “I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

189. “For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

190. “How entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul !”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Featured in: Book Quotes

191. “Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

192. “Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

193. “A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

194. “To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

196. “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; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

197. “Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

198. “Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

199. “The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

200. “Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within. Contrarily, if they are active within, they do not care to be dragged out of themselves; it disturbs and impedes their thoughts in a way that is often most ruinous to them.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer