Top 100 Schopenhauer's Quotes
#1. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.
Alain De Botton
#2. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my
Albert Einstein
#3. Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.
Philip Kitcher
#4. Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe's principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors
Thomas Ligotti
#5. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain De Botton
#6. A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#7. In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#8. A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#9. (Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#10. In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#11. In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel's, Herbart's and Schleiermacher's complete philosophical works.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#12. 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#14. To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#16. The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#17. As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies
Arthur Schopenhauer
#18. When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#19. The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#20. He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#21. I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#23. Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#26. It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#28. Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#29. It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#30. Where there is no love, a person's faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#31. Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#32. Hence, in all countries the chief occupation of society is card-playing, and it is the gauge of its value, and an outward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
Arthur Schopenhauer
#33. To measure a man's happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#34. Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#35. People's envy shows how unhappy they feel; their constant attention to the doings of others how bored they are.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#36. The golden apples drop from the same tree, whether they be gathered by an imbecile locksmith's apprentice or by a Schopenhauer.
C. G. Jung
#37. Schopenhauer said only men had the total objectivity necessary for genius, and that you only had to look at a woman's shape to see that she wasn't intended for much mental or physical work.
Jacky Fleming
#38. A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people's thoughts are constantly forced upon it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#39. Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.
P.G. Wodehouse
#41. Fundamentally it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life, for only these do we really understand through and through. The thoughts of another that we have read are crumbs from another's table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#42. The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#43. There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#45. If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
Stephen Fry
#46. Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#47. It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#48. Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#49. Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#50. Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#51. One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#52. The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#53. The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#55. Every parting is a foretaste of death, and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#56. Me and Schopenhauer. Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.
Philip Kerr
#58. Time is merely the spread-out and piecemeal view that an individual being has of the Ideas.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#59. Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#60. Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.
Roger Scruton
#61. Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude
Arthur Schopenhauer
#63. Schopenhauer had been Hitler's philosophical god in the early days. In power it was Nietzsche.
Ernst Hanfstaengl
#64. Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I'd love to be able to eat with my eyes - I'm
Irvin D. Yalom
#65. The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#66. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#68. To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#69. That when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
Arthur Schopenhauer
#70. Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#71. What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#72. 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#73. A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#74. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#76. The eternal being ... , as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#77. The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#78. Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#79. It is for this
reason that we find that co-existence, which could neither be in
time alone, for time has no contiguity, nor in space alone, for
space has no before, after, or now,
Arthur Schopenhauer
#80. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
Jorge Luis Borges
#81. Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.
Gilles Deleuze
#82. I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#83. 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#86. Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to
procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#87. We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#88. All religions promise a reward beyond this life in eternity for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head, of the understanding.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#90. It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#91. 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
#92. The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech ... As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere ... When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#93. If we are distracted and read thoughtlessly, and then realize that we have indeed taken in all the words, but no concepts.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#94. Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#95. The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you're a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
Joseph Campbell
#97. Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#98. There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
Arthur Schopenhauer
#99. 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#100. Dialectic is the art of intellectual fencing; and it is only when we so regard it that we can erect it into a branch of knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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