( German Philosopher ) 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860
Arthur Schopenhauer
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.
If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
We seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
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.
Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
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.
Reading is thinking with someone else’s head instead of one’s own.
To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.
This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.
The world is my idea.
Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.
The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
Common people are merely intent on spending time – whoever has some talent, on making use of it.
The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings.
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.
A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new content.
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided according, as a man’s personal value is large or small.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
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.
The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in other companies.
