Arthur Schopenhauer

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.

To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.

Life without pain has no meaning.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.

Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.

The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.

Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.