"Human life must be some form of mistake."
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Quote collection
Arthur Schopenhauer quotes (page 21 of 29)
571 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others."
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"Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches."
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"Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones."
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"A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft."
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"That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject."
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"To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever."
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"To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it."
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"Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small."
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"For an act to be moral the intention must be based on compassion, not duty. We do something because we want to do it, because we feel we have to do it, not because we ought to do it. And even if our efforts fail - or we never even get to implement them - we are still moral because our motivation was based on compassion."
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"He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?"
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"In order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence."
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"Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?"
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"It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad."
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"One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being."
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"Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received."
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"Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place."
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"Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil."
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"The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves."
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"My body and my will are one."
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