Arthur Schopenhauer

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

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

It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

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 solemnity.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming.