182 quotes
The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
The World as Will and Representation (1819)
One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain [...] is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.
Essays and Aphorisms (1970)
The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.
The World as Will and Representation (1819)
It is a great folly to lose the inner man in order to gain the outer, that is, to give up the whole or the greater part of one’s quiet, leisure, and independence for splendour, rank, pomp, titles and honours.
The fool in purple groans under the burden of his wretched individuality that cannot be thrown off, whereas the man of great gifts populates and animates with his ideas the most dreary and desolate environment.
The moral virtues, hence justice and philanthropy, if pure, spring, as I have shown, from the fact that the will-to-live, seeing through the principium individuationis, recognizes itself again in all its phenomena.
The World As Will and Representation Vol. I and II (1844)
Optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.
The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
That I could clamber to the frozen moon
And draw the ladder after me.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Honor … means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.
National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Compared with genuine personal advantages, such as a great mind or a great heart, all the privileges of rank, birth, even royal birth, wealth, and so on, are as kings on the stage to kings in real life.
A man’s face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man’s thoughts and aspirations.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy.
They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)