Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

202. “Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

203. “The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

204. “In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel’s, Herbart’s and Schleiermacher’s complete philosophical works.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

205. “What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

206. “To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

207. “A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

208. “All our wanting comes from needs, thus we continiously suffer. The intellect teaches free will, free from suffering.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

209. “Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

210. “In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

211. “For what a man is in himself, what accompanies him when he is alone, what no one can give or take away, is obviously more essential to him than everything he has in the way of possessions, or even what he may be in the eyes of the world. An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can ward off boredom from a dullard.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

212. “What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

213. “Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

214. “Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

215. “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

216. “Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

217. “Rudeness is better than any argument; it totally eclipses intellect.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

218. “The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

220. “Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

221. “Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

222. “Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

223. “The longer a man’s fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

224. “Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

226. “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

227. “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

228. “A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

229. “Therefore it has always been said that music is the language of feeling and of passion, as words are the language of reason.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

230. “To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

231. “Therefore, we do not become conscious of the three greatest blessings of life as such, namely health, youth, and freedom, as long as we possess them, but only after we have lost them; for they too are negations.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

232. “God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

233. “A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

235. “The cheapest kind of pride, on the other hand, is national pride. For it betrays in those affected by it the lack of individual qualities of which they could be proud, since they would otherwise not grasp at something that they share with so many millions. Rather those who possess significant personal qualities will recognize most clearly the faults of their own nation, since they constantly have them in front of them.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

236. “Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

237. “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

238. “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

239. “Therefore if egoism has a firm hold of a man and masters him, whether it be in the form of joy, or triumph, or lust, or hope, or frantic grief, or annoyance, or anger, or fear, or suspicion, or passion of any kind – he is in the devil’s clutches and how he got into them does not matter. What is needful is that he should make haste to get out of them; and here, again, it does not matter how.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

240. “In the first place, no man is happy but strives his whole life long after a supposed happiness which he seldom attains, and even if he does it is only to be disappointed with it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

241. “On account of its originality, excellence in every field strikes us as so new and so strange, that to recognize it at first glance will require not only understanding, but also education in the same discipline. As a rule, excellence achieves late recognition, all the later as the discipline is loftier, and those who truly enlighten humankind share the fate of the fixed stars, the light from which requires many years before it descends to the horizon.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

242. “Virtue cannot be taught, no more than genius; indeed, concepts are as unfruitful for it as for art and of use only as tools.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

243. “Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

244. “To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

245. “True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

246. “The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and more slowly does it mature.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

247. “Consideration of the kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to embrace the belief that the greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

248. “Fundamental disposition towards others, assuming the character either of Envy or of Sympathy, is the point at which the moral virtues and vices of mankind first diverge.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

249. “The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

250. “The reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer