Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

359. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

362. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

364. “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

365. “All striving comes from lack, from a dissatisfaction with one’s condition, and is thus suffering as long as it is not satisfied; but no satisfaction is lasting; instead, it is only the beginning of a new striving. We see striving everywhere inhibited in many ways, struggling everywhere; and thus always suffering; there is no final goal of striving, and therefore no bounds or end to suffering.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

366. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

385. “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

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. “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

388. “Authority and example lead the world.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

392. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

399. “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

400. “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