Quotes by Schopenhauer

“On a cold winters day, a group of porcupines huddled together to stay warm and keep from freezing. But soon they felt one anothers quills and moved apart. When the need for warmth brought them clos...”

“Every society requires mutual accommodation and mutually agreeable temper; hence the larger it is, the duller.”

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

“A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take,...”

“There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and f...”

“I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a...”

“Let us see rather that like Janusor better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of deathreligion has two faces, one very friendly, one very gloomy...”

“It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, sp...”

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

“On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that t...”

“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy”

“Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.”

“Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.”

“It follows from Schopenhauers analysis that evert genuine work of art must have its origin in direct perception; that is to say it does not originate in concepts, and concepts are not what it commu...”

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”

“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read wh...”

“Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.”

“This consists in not taking a book into ones hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a...”

“[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves wit...”