Schopenhauer Quotes

JedeTrennung gibt einenVorgeschmack desTodesund jedes Wiedersehen einenVorgeschmack der Auferstehung. Every parting is a foretaste of death, and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection.

[T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror.

Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

Newspapers are the second hand of history.

Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.

With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.

A happy life is impos­si­ble; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.

Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.

The eternal being..., as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.

For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.

[T]he appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.

The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.

It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of possessions.

What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.

The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime.

Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.

Personal courage is really a very subordinate virtue-a virtue, indeed, in which we are surpassed by the lower animals; or else you would not hear people say, as brave as a lion.

Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest

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?

The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.

It is most important to allow the brain the full measure of sleep which is required to restore it; for sleep is to a man's whole nature what winding up is to a clock.

Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.

For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.

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

One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.

To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.

Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?

Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

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

Human life must be some form of mistake.

My body and my will are one.

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.

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

In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.

Knowledge is to certain extent a second existence.

...in the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone.

Mostly the loss teaches us only about the value of things.

There is only one healing force, and that is nature; in pills and ointments there is none. At most they can give the healing force of nature a hint about where there is something for it to do.

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.

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

You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.