Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.
Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.)
The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.
A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.
The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.
Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.
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.
Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else.
The reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment.
Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.
If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.
I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.
For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.
A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.
There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
[T]he appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.
The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.
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.
The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest
This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
Reasonable and vicious are quite consistent with each other, in fact, only through their union are great and far-reaching crimes possible
Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious... and consequently the concentration of all desire
I know of no more beautiful prayer than that which the Hindus of old used in closing: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.