Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

There is something in us that is wiser than our head.

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.

It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.

The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.

The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending.

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.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.

Mostly the loss teaches us only about the value of things.

All wanting comes from need, therefore from lack, therefore from suffering.

Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.

The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.

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.

We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.

You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.

When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.

No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.

With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.

Unrest is the mark of existence.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.

The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use

All our wanting comes from needs, thus we continiously suffer. The intellect teaches free will, free from suffering.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.

The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.

This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost are and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.

A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.

However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.

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

For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.

Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.

A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.

To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.

If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.

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

This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.

Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.