Quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

There is an underlying unity in all things

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.

Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man IS contributes more to his happiness than what he HAS.

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.

There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.

If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.

One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.

Man shows his character best in trifles.

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.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

The beard, being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police - It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another but women are by nature enemies.

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.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

...in the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.