Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

303. “It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

304. “To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

305. “Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

307. “The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

308. “A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles, for then he is off his guard.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

309. “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

310. “Unrest is the mark of existence.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

311. “You should deal sternly and despotically with your memory, so that it does not unlearn obedience; if, for example, you cannot call something to mind, a line of poetry or a word perhaps, you should not go and look it up in a book, but periodically plague your memory with it for weeks on end until your memory has done its duty. For the longer you have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will it stay once you have got it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

313. “The greatest wisdom consists in enjoying the present and making this enjoyment the goal of life, because the present is all that is real and everything else merely imaginary. But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

314. “Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

315. “For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

316. “Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

317. “The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

318. “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

319. “We learn by experience that happiness and pleasure are a fata morgana, which, visible from afar, vanish as we approach; that, on the other hand, suffering and pain are a reality, which makes its presence felt without any intermediary, and for its effect, stands in no need of illusion or the play of false hope.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

320. “Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

322. “The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

323. “All religions promise a reward beyond this life in eternity for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head, of the understanding.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

324. “To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

325. “This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

326. “For what is our civilised world but a big masquerade? where you meet knights, priests, soldiers, men of learning, barristers, clergymen, philosophers, and I don’t know what all! But they are not what they pretend to be; they are only masks, and, as a rule, behind the masks you will find moneymakers.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

327. “It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

328. “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

329. “When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

330. “Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

331. “In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

332. “Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

333. “Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness and happens for it alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of this consciousness, which is in most cases far more important than the circumstances which go to form its contents.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

334. “In truth the most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

335. “Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

336. “It is really most absurd to wish to turn this scene of misery into a pleasure spot and set ourselves the goal of achieving pleasures and joys instead of freedom from pain, as so many do. Those who, with too gloomy a gaze, regard this world as a kind of hell and, accordingly, are only concerned with procuring a fireproof room in it, are much less mistaken. The fool runs after the pleasures of life and sees himself cheated; the sage avoids evils.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

337. “Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

338. “The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

339. “No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

340. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of possessions.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

341. “Whoever attaches great importance to the opinions of people pays them too much honour.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

342. “Fundamentally it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life, for only these do we really understand through and through. The thoughts of another that we have read are crumbs from another’s table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

343. “The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

344. “Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

345. “Every State looks upon its neighbours as at bottom a horde of robbers, who will fall upon it as soon as they have the opportunity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

346. “In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

347. “My body and my will are one.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

348. “A library may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so useful as one that is small but well arranged. In the same way, a man may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly pondered.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

349. “Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

350. “Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer