Enjoy this collection of phrases by Arthur Schopenhauer that will provide you with great and good advice that you can apply in many aspects of your life.
The German philosopher and mathematician Arthur Schopenhauer who rose to fame in the 19th century is considered one of the most influential philosophers in the modern world. He was born into a wealthy and aristocratic family and received a first-class education before embarking on a career in philosophy and before long became one of the most influential voices in Europe.
In 1818, Schopenhauer published his most famous philosophical book entitled “The World as Will and Representation” which marked the beginning of a new era in philosophy after the era of Kant. His school of philosophy can be described as pessimistic and he painted a picture of a world that might not be as optimistic as people might claim. Later scholars have called it philosophical pessimism.
Schopenhauer’s philosophical theories not only opened new horizons but also influenced some of the greatest intellectuals such as Leo Tolstoy, Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges, Carl Jung and many others.
Arthur Schopenhauer quotes
Schopenhauer was one of the greatest intellectuals who ever lived, and as such, it’s no wonder he created a host of brilliant quotes. Here are some.
Here are the best quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer:
1. “It is difficult for us to find happiness within ourselves, but it is impossible to find it elsewhere.”
2. “The best and the most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.”
3. “Compassion for animals is deeply associated with goodness of character, and I can safely say that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”
4. “Music is the melody whose text is the world.”
5. “Talent reaches a goal that no one else can reach. The genius reaches a goal that no one else can see.”
6. “Compassion is the basis of morality.”
7. “All truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first she is ridiculed. In the second it generates a violent opposition. In the third it is accepted as if it were something obvious.”
8. “Religions are like fireflies. They need darkness to shine.”
9. “What people commonly call fate is, as a rule, nothing more than their own stupid and foolish conduct.”
10. “A sense of humor is the only divine quality of man.”
11. “A man can only be himself while he is alone and if he does not love his solitude, he will not love his freedom, because only when we are alone are we truly free.”
12. “Above all, it is losing something that teaches us the value of things.”
13. “In music all feelings return to their pure state and the world is nothing but music made real.”
14. “Happiness consists in a frequent repetition of pleasure.”
15. “Every person takes the limits of his own field of vision as the limits of the world.”
16. “The person who writes for fools will always be sure of a large audience.”
17. “We must use common words to say unusual things.”
18. “We lose three quarters of ourselves trying to be like other people.”
19. “Treat a work of art like a prince: let her speak to you first.”
20. “Our task is not to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what no one has yet thought about what everyone sees.”
21. “Great men are like eagles that build their nest on high and deep loneliness.”
22. “Religion is the masterpiece of the art of training people, because it teaches people how they should think.”
23. “A high degree of intellect tends to make a man antisocial.”
24. “Life and dreams are pages within the same book; reading it in order is living; to look at it is to dream.”
25. “Hope is the confusion of the desire to obtain something with its probability.”
26. “Getting married means halving rights and doubling duties.”
27. “We can consider our life as a pointlessly disturbing episode in the blissful rest of nothingness.”
28. “Each farewell gives us a foretaste of death, each meeting is an indication of the resurrection.”
29. “The brevity of life that we so often lament, may be the best of it.”
30. “Humanity is in danger of being destroyed by the excessive importance of unimportant things such as money or power.”
31. “The intelligent man seeks a quiet, modest life, protected from misfortunes; and if he has a superior spirit, he will choose solitude.”
32. “Buying books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them.”
33. “Only change is eternal, perpetual and immortal.”
34. “The surest way to not become very miserable is not to wait until you are very happy.”
35. “Almost all of our pain stems from our relationships with other people. There is no more wrong path to happiness than worldliness.”
36. “Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become and the same goes for fame.”
37. “Man is the only animal that causes pain to others with no other purpose than wanting to do so.”
38. “If we weren’t so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to bear it.”
39. “Life swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom.”
40. “Feeling envy is human, enjoying the misfortune of others is demonic.”
41. “The majority of men are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and they are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.”
42. “Faith is like love cannot be imposed by force.”
43. “He who writes carelessly confesses from the beginning that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.”
44. “The novelist’s job is not to recount great events, but to make small ones interesting.”
45. “Courtesy is to human nature what heat is to wax.”
46. “Doctors see all the weaknesses of humanity; the lawyers all the evil and the theologians all the stupidity.”
47. “Authority and example are what run the world.”
48. “I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise each person can tolerate without becoming uncomfortable is inversely proportional to their intelligence, and therefore I consider it a fairly fair measure.”
49. “Reading is thinking with someone else’s head instead of your own.”
50. “We rarely think about what we have, but we always think about what we lack.”
51. “The rascals are always sociable and the first sign that a man has some nobility in his character is the little pleasure he feels in the company of others.”
52. “There is no favorable wind for those who do not know which port they are heading to.”
53. “If we suspect that a man is lying, we must pretend that we believe him; because he then becomes bolder and more confident, lies more vigorously and then he unmasks himself.”
54. “Ordinary people just think about how to pass the time, extraordinary people think about how to use it.”
55. “Men are the demons of the earth and animals are their tormented souls.”
56. “Every genius is a great child who looks at the world as something strange, as a spectacle, and therefore with a purely objective interest.”
57. “Every nation makes fun of the others and they are all right.”
58. “Each new generation no matter how miserable they are in character, they think they are much wiser than the one immediately before, not to mention those who are even further away.”
59. “The first forty years of our life give us the text; the next thirty, the comment.”
60. “Whatever torch you light and regardless of the space you illuminate, our horizon will always remain surrounded by the depth of the night.”
61. “After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.”
62. “No money is better used by us than that which we have allowed ourselves to be robbed, because it has served us to buy prudence.”
63. “Patriotism is the passion of fools and the dumbest of all passions.”
64. “The scholars are those who have read many books, but the thinkers, the geniuses, the illuminators of the world and the reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.”
65. “Many times things are not given to the one who deserves them the most, but to the one who knows how to insistently ask for them.”
66. “Life is short and the truth goes far and lasts a long time: let’s tell the truth.”
67. “There is no absurdity so palpable that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to instill it before the age of five, repeating it constantly with an air of great solemnity.”
68. “Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are always enemies by nature.”
69. “Getting married means blindfoldedly grabbing a sack in the hope of finding an eel among a group of snakes.”
70. “Fate is the one that shuffles the cards, but we decide how we play them.”
71. “Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes a greater capacity for pain, and only with the highest degree of intelligence does suffering reach its highest point.”
72. “A main obstacle to the progress of humanity is that people do not listen to those who speak sensibly but to those who speak louder.”
73. “A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.”
74. “Money is human happiness in the abstract; therefore, the man who is no longer capable of enjoying happiness in the concrete, puts his whole heart into money.”
75. “The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.”
76. “If God made this world, then I wouldn’t want to be the God. It is full of misery and anguish that breaks my heart.”
77. “Other people’s heads are too miserable a place for true happiness to have its seat in them.”
78. “The less intelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”
79. “A man who does not have enough originality to think of a new title for his book will be much less able to give it new content.”
80. “Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive inside.”
81. “Envy in men shows us how unhappy they really feel, and their constant attention to what others do or do not do, shows how bored they are.”
82. “Life is a war without truce and we die with weapons in our hands.”
83. “Vulgar men have invented life in society because it is easier for them to put up with others than to put up with themselves.”
84. “The last years of life resemble the end of a masquerade ball in which the masks are dropped.”
85. “Because it is a matter of daily observation to see that people enjoy more trying to satisfy their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparing oneself with others.”
86. “Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the principal at death; and the higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the more the redemption date will be postponed.”
87. “The life of each individual, seen in a general way and only when we emphasize its most significant characteristics, is really a tragedy; but analyzing it in detail, it has the character of a comedy.”
88. “There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in regarding the world as a kind of hell, and in limiting one’s efforts to securing a small room that is not exposed to fire.”
89. “People are never happy, but they spend their lives running after something they think will make them happy. They rarely reach their goal, and when they do, they only end up disappointed.”
90. “There is no greater spiritual enjoyment than reading the ancient classics: just reading them, even for half an hour, purifies us, recreates, refreshes, elevates and strengthens us, as if we had drunk from a fresh spring that flows between rocks .”
What did you learn from these quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer?
You may or may not agree with Schopenhauer’s way of thinking, but a person who is willing to follow his thoughts and see where they lead can discover many truths along the way.
What were your favorite phrases? Let us know in the comments section below.