Quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

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

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

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.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearerÂ's mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.

All truth passes through 3 stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Every nation ridicules other nations -- and all are right.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Fame is something that must be won. Honor is something that must not be lost.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but is also a disruption of thought.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost care and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome-to be got over.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.

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

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.