182 quotes
It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to become.
If education or warning were of any avail, how could Seneca's pupil be a Nero?
Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.
The highest pleasures, those of the mind, are inaccessible to them and they try in vain to replace them by the fleeting pleasures of the senses.
Politeness is a tacit agreement that people’s miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made a subject of reproach.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome — to be got over.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artifices as we do our own selves.
One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
In philosophy at the universities truth occupies only a secondary place and, if called upon, she must get up and make room for another attribute.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
The truth can wait, for she lives a long life.
Philosophy of religion … really amounts to … philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.
The World as Will and Representation (1819)
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
All the pomp and pleasure that are mirrored in the dull consciousness of a simpleton are very poor when compared with the consciousness of Cervantes writing Don Quixote in a miserable prison.
The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".
On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900)