Arthur Schopenhauer

Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.

What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.

Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.

The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.

Truth is most beautiful undraped.

Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

All religions promise a reward beyond life, in eternity, for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.

No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.

The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it.