Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

202. “For as a rule a man must have worth in himself in order to recognise it and believe in it willingly and freely in others.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

208. “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

209. “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

210. “He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

211. “The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

212. “If a relationship is perfectly natural there will be a complete fusion of the happiness of both of you-owing to fellow-feeling and various other laws which govern our natures, this is, quite simply, the greatest happiness that can exist.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

214. “Better alone than amongst traitors.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

215. “Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

216. “Health outweighs all other blessings so much that one may really say that a healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king. A quiet and cheerful temperament, happy in the enjoyment of a perfectly sound physique, an intellect clear, lively, penetrating and seeing things as they are, a moderate and gentle will, and therefore a good conscience – these are privileges which no rank or wealth can make up for or replace.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

217. “I know of no more beautiful prayer than that which the Hindus of old used in closing: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

218. “A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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219. “Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

220. “Sleep is to a man what winding up is to a clock.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

221. “Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

222. “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

223. “Where there is no love, a person’s faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

224. “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

225. “Personal courage is really a very subordinate virtue-a virtue, indeed, in which we are surpassed by the lower animals; or else you would not hear people say, as brave as a lion.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

227. “Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

229. “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

230. “The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

231. “The problem with Germans is that they look in the clouds for what lies at their feet.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

232. “It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

234. “Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

236. “I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

237. “La vida es una guerra sin tregua, y se muere con las armas en la mano.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

239. “My body and my will are one.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

240. “Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

241. “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

242. “Riches, one may say, are like sea-water; the more you drink the thirstier you become; and the same is true of fame.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

243. “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

244. “Das Leben schwingt, gleich einem Pendel, hin und her, zwischen dem Schmerz und der Langeweile.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

245. “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

246. “Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

247. “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

248. “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

249. “The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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250. “To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer