Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

403. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

405. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

408. “The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

409. “To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

410. “Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

411. “The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

412. “Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

413. “It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

414. “To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn’t.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

415. “For where did Dante take the material of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

416. “Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

417. “It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

418. “Not to go to the theater is like making one’s toilet without a mirror.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

419. “Beauty is an open letter of recommendation that wins hearts for us in advance.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

420. “Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

421. “If he has a soul above the common, or if he is a man of genius, he will occasionally feel like some noble prisoner of state, condemned to work in the galleys with common criminals; and he will follow his example and try to isolate himself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

422. “It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

423. “Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

424. “For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms; they shine only when it is dark.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

425. “Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

426. “For our improvement we need a mirror.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

427. “When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

428. “Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

429. “How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

430. “Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

431. “People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

432. “Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

433. “Behind the cross stands the devil.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

434. “If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

435. “One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

436. “So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

437. “If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

438. “We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

439. “There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

440. “Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend mine reflecting on it.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

441. “Even trees must be shaken by the wind, if they are to thrive.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

442. “We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

443. “In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

444. “Everything that happens, happens of necessity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

445. “We take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

446. “There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

447. “The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

448. “Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

449. “A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

450. “All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer