Top 500 Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

412. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

414. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

416. “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

417. “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

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418. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

420. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

426. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

428. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

430. “Behind the cross stands the devil.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

431. “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

432. “Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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434. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

436. “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

437. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

439. “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

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440. “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

441. “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

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

443. “Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

446. “If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

447. “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

448. “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

449. “Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

450. “When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip unnapreciated and unenjoyed by was their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer