Quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious... and consequently the concentration of all desire

Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

Where there is no love, a person's faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.

The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

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.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.

A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.

Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.

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.

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.

A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.

Consequently, we should try as much as possible to maintain a high degree of health; for cheerfulness is the very flower of it.