Quotes By Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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

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

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

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

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

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.

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.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

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

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

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