Quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

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

Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.

It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too.

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.

No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting, but man does it, and it is this that constitutes the diabolical feature in his character which is so much worse than the merely animal.

Out of any piece of wood a god may be carved.

You can also look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.

The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying.

For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it.

La vida es una guerra sin tregua, y se muere con las armas en la mano.

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

Virtue cannot be taught, no more than genius; indeed, concepts are as unfruitful for it as for art and of use only as tools.

The past and the future (considered apart from the consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and the present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them.

If we are distracted and read thoughtlessly, and then realize that we have indeed taken in all the words, but no concepts.

Heiraten heißt das Mögliche t(h)un, einander zum Ekel zu werden. (Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.)

No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.

clumsy charlatan like Hegel is confidently branded as such? German philosophy is precisely so, laden with contempt, mocked abroad, rejected by honest sciences – like a strumpet who, for filthy lucre, yesterday gave herself up to one, today to another; and the minds of the contemporary generation of scholars are jumbled by Hegelian nonsense: incapable of thought, coarse and stupefied, they become the prey of the vulgar materialism that has crept out of the Basilisk's egg

Therefore, we do not become conscious of the three greatest blessings of life as such, namely health, youth, and freedom, as long as we possess them, but only after we have lost them; for they too are negations.

However much the plays and the masks on the world's stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.

Whatever one may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is the moment ... falling asleep, and the unhappiest moment of the unhappy that of his awaking

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.

Better alone than amongst traitors.

Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow.

It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.