Arthur Schopenhauer (born 22 February 1788, Danzig, Prussia [now Gdańsk, Poland] – died 21 September 1860, Frankfurt, German Confederation) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable noumenal will.
Schopenhauer is also known as the "philosopher of pessimism". His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.Compassion is the basis of morality.All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.One should use common words to say uncommon things.To live alone is the fate of all great souls.Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
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 this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.Life is a constant process of dying.We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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.Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
Arthur Schopenhauer
No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.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.Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Arthur Schopenhauer
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.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.
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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.Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.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.If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.The world is my idea.The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.The present is the only reality and the only certainty.Music is the melody whose text is the world.I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.We seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack.What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.
