Collected Meditations
Showing 87 quotesTo find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.— Arthur Schopenhauer
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.— Arthur Schopenhauer
The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.— Arthur Schopenhauer
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.— Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.— Arthur Schopenhauer
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.— Arthur Schopenhauer
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.— Arthur Schopenhauer
The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.— Arthur Schopenhauer
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.— Arthur Schopenhauer
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.— Arthur Schopenhauer
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.— Arthur Schopenhauer
It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.— Arthur Schopenhauer
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.— Arthur Schopenhauer
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.— Arthur Schopenhauer