Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

158. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

161. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

163. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

165. “The ordinary man places his life’s happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

167. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “Since love is a deception practiced by nature, marriage is the attrition of love and must be disillusioning. Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage and philosophers do not marry.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse – until at last the worst of all arrives.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

194. “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

195. “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

196. “The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

197. “Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man’s personal value is large or small.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

198. “A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

199. “Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

200. “In savage countries they eat one another, in civilized they deceive one another; and that is what people call the way of the world!”

— Arthur Schopenhauer