Author

Arthur Schopenhauer

63 quotations

About Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher and writer. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism.

Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Arthur Schopenhauer
Topics: Great Death Nature Happiness Truth Alone
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 s…
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived op…
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

Advertisement

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.
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.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Money is human happiness in the abstract he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.