Arthur Schopenhauer Philosophical Quotations

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

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

It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

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

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

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

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

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

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming.

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

Life is a constant process of dying.

In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel's, Herbart's and Schleiermacher's complete philosophical works.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves itto the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.

Newspapers are the second hand of history.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.

It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.