Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extension: which is why in this respect one man can confidently take on ten thousand, and a thousand fools do not make one wise man.
on The Suffering Of The Worldby arthur Schopenhauer
For the longer to have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will is stay once you have got it.
If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.
Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse.
A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Because appearance remains appearance and does not become thing in itself.
We all feel that we are something other than a being which someone once created out of nothing: from this arises the confidence that, while death may be able to end our life, it cannot end our existence.
We take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something.
The greatest wisdom consists in enjoying the present and making this enjoyment the goal of life, because the present is all that is real and everything else merely imaginary. But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.
