Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

204. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

208. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

210. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

235. “A man may begin by following the craving of desire, until he comes to see how hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses; and this it is that makes people hermits, penitents, Magdalenes.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

238. “Genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world; and this not merely for moments, but with the necessary continuity and conscious thought to enable us to repeat by deliberate art what has been apprehended and “what in wavering apparition gleams fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever!”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

239. “Das Ganze der Erfahrung gleicht einer Geheimschrift und die Philosophie der Entzifferung derselben. The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

240. “There is no happiness on earth to compare with that which a beautiful and fruitful mind finds in a propitious hour within itself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

241. “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

242. “Think what you’re doing! When you say I, I, I want to exist, it is not you alone that says this. Everything says it, absolutely everything that has the faintest trace of consciousness. It follows, then, that this desire of yours is just the part of you that is not individual – the part that is common to all things without distinction.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

243. “Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

244. “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

245. “The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

249. “The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer