Famous Quotes

Quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

• A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
• After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
• All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
• Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
• As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
• Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
• Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
• Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
• Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
• Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
• Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
• Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
• Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
• Hatred is an affair of the heart contempt that of the head.
• In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.
• It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
• It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.
• Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
• Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another but women are by nature enemies.
• Money is human happiness in the abstract he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
• Music is the melody whose text is the world.
• Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
• Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.
• Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
• Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
• Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
• Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
• Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
• Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
• Talent hits a target no one else can hit Genius hits a target no one else can see.
• The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
• The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
• The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
• The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.