Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

About Author

Arthur Schopenhauer ( SHOH-pən-how-ər; German: [ˈaʁtuːɐ̯ ˈʃoːpn̩haʊɐ] ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), 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.
Schopenhauer was among the first philosophers in the Western tradition to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, he had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology has influenced many thinkers and artists.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnit...

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

One should use common words to say uncommon things

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an abs...

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.

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.

What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Decept...

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man

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