Quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.

Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

...nothing at all rides on the life or death of the individual.

You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

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.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of the world.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.

Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.

Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.

Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

A man can do what he wants. But he can't want what he wants.

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

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident.

Astrology furnishes a splendid proof of the contemptible subjectivity of men. It refers the course of celestial bodies to the miserable ego: it establishes a connection between the comets in heaven and squabbles and rascalities on earth.