Quotes By Arthur Schopenhauer

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

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

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

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

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

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.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

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.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

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.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

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

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

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

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

Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

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