Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

253. “Thus, flowers cannot be preserved, but their ethereal oil, their essence, with the same smell and the same virtues, can. The conduct that has had correct concepts for its guidance will, in the result, coincide with the reality intended.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

254. “Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

255. “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

256. “People’s envy shows how unhappy they feel; their constant attention to the doings of others how bored they are.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

271. “For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “It will generally be found that as soon the terrors of live reach the point where they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

277. “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

278. “Better alone than amongst traitors.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

281. “Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

282. “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

283. “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

284. “Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

285. “There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

286. “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

287. “The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

289. “Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

290. “Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

291. “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

292. “That I could clamber to the frozen moon. And draw the ladder after me.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

293. “In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

294. “Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

297. “The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror’s booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

298. “Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

299. “You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer