Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.

Unrest is the mark of existence.

Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.

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.

There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.

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.

It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.

What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.

Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.

It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.

Monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun 3,000 years: just because a jealous god had said, Thou shalt make no graven image.

Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live.

Time is that in which all things pass away.

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.

Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.

Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.

Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.