958 Quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

Our greatest sufferings do not lie in the present, as intuitive representations or immediate feeling, but rather in reason, as abstract concepts, tormenting thoughts.

It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.

A man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbour with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he is happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.

Whatever one may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is the moment ... falling asleep, and the unhappiest moment of the unhappy that of his awaking

... life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together

A solidão é a sorte de todos os espíritos excepcionais.

The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest - The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

Dialectic is the art of intellectual fencing; and it is only when we so regard it that we can erect it into a branch of knowledge.

What does the absolute mean? Something that is, and of which (under pain of punishment) we dare not ask further whence and why it is. A precious rarity for professors of philosophy!