Arthur Schopenhauer

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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

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

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

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

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

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire.

We often find that people are most insolent and arrogant where they have least reason to be so.

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

The more you leave a man to his own will, the more he will feel his own weakness.

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.

We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.

The present is the only reality and the only certainty.

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete, devotes his heart entirely to money.

The world is my representation.

No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.

Life is a constant process of dying.