Arthur Schopenhauer

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

—Arthur Schopenhauer

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?

—Arthur Schopenhauer

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

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner.. If I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is a constant process of dying.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet’s tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice… That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

One should use common words to say uncommon things.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man’s personal value is large or small.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Compassion is the basis of morality.

—Arthur Schopenhauer