Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

For our improvement we need a mirror.

At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.

Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate.

Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.

If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?

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.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.

Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.

Time is that in which all things pass away.

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

Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.

There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence ... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment.

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.