Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

357. “The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

359. “We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

362. “Because appearance remains appearance and does not become thing in itself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

363. “If there is anything in the world that can really be called a mans property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

364. “Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

365. “To measure a man’s happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

366. “I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant’s works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

367. “Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast upon existence itself, its vain and worthless nature is brought home to us; and this is what we mean by boredom.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

368. “There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

369. “It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

370. “If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

371. “Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

372. “It is just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

373. “But inherited wealth reaches its utmost value when it falls to the individual endowed with mental powers of a high order, who is resolved to pursue a line of life not compatible with the making of money; for he is then doubly endowed by fate and can live for his genius; and he will pay his debt to mankind a hundred times, by achieving what no other could achieve, by producing some work which contributes to the general good, and redounds to the honor of humanity at large.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

374. “If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

375. “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

376. “Hence, in all countries the chief occupation of society is card-playing, and it is the gauge of its value, and an outward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

377. “The actual facts of morality are too much on my side for me to fear that my theory can ever be replaced or upset by any other.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

378. “Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

379. “You can know only what you have thought about.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

380. “Conscience accompanies every act with the comment: You should act differently, although its true sense is: You could be other than you are.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

381. “It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

382. “Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

383. “Caci avutia este ca apa sarata: cu cat bei cu atat ti-e mai este. La fel este si gloria.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

384. “This is in the highest degree the case with many of Goethe’s and Byron’s poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of phantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

385. “Genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among gemstones; it radiates its own light while the others only reflect what they receive.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

386. “The characteristic mark of minds of the first rank is the immediacy of all their judgements. Everything they produce is the result of thinking for themselves and already in the way it is spoken everywhere announces itself as such.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

387. “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

388. “There are tree main bulwarks of defence against new thoughts: to pay no heed, to give no credence, and finally to assert that it had already long existed.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

389. “Life presents itself first and foremost as a task: the task of maintaining itself, the task of earning one’s living. If this task is accomplished, what has been gained is a burden, and there then appears a second task: that of doing something with it so as to ward off boredom, which hovers over every secure life like a bird of prey. Thus the first task is to gain something and the second to become unconscious of what has been gained, which is otherwise a burden.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

390. “You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

391. “Life is only the mirror into which a man gazes not in order that he may get a reflection of himself, but that he may come to understand himself by that reflection; that he may see what it is that the mirror shows.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

393. “If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

394. “There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

395. “Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

396. “It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

397. “Why is it that, in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

398. “The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

399. “Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

400. “If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer