958 Quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

Die, welche schwierige, dunkle, verflochtene, zweideutige Reden zusammensetzen, wissen ganz gewiss nicht recht, was sie sagen wollen, sondern haben nur ein dumpfes, nach einem Gedanken erst ringendes Bewusstsein davon; oft aber wollen sie sich selber und anderen verbergen, dass sie eigentlich nichts zu sagen haben.

When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip unnapreciated and unenjoyed by was their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.

To measure a man's happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator.

What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to the will, and thus also to the organism which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in the approximate same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites.

Spirit? Who is that fellow? And where do you know him from? Is he perhaps not merely an arbitrary and convenient hypostasis that you have not even defined, let alone deduced or proved? Do you think you have an audience of old women in front of you?

Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else

Genius lives only one storey above madness

Genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among gemstones; it radiates its own light while the others only reflect what they receive.

The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.