Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
Page 7 of 10

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

314. “Knowledge is to certain extent a second existence.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

315. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

320. “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

321. “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

322. “There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

323. “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

324. “Newspapers are the second hand of history.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

325. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “My body and my will are one.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

333. “Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to – better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

335. “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

336. “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

337. “That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

338. “In many cases hate a person is rooted in the involuntary estimate of its virtues.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

340. “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

341. “It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

342. “Motives are causes experienced from within.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

343. “Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

344. “It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

346. “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

347. “Courage, however, may also be explained as a readiness to meet ills that threaten at the moment, in order to avoid greater ills that lie in the future; whereas cowardice does the contrary.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

349. “The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

350. “He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch, arise directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not himself confirmed.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer