13 Quotes from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

1. “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”- Arthur Schopenhauer

2. “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”- Arthur Schopenhauer

3. “Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little death.”- Arthur Schopenhauer


4. “In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.”- Arthur Schopenhauer

5. “In the first place, no one is happy, but everyone throughout his life strives for an alleged happiness that is rarely attained, and even then only to disappoint him. As a rule, everyone ultimately reaches port with masts and rigging gone; but then it immaterial whether he was happy or unhappy in a life which consisted merely of a fleeting vanishing present and is now over and finished.” - Arthur Schopenhauer


6. “Now we take no delight in our existence except in striving for something when the distance and obstacles make us think that the goal will be satisfactory, an illusion that vanishes when it is reached.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

7. “Only to the animal lacking thoughts or ideas do the world and existence appear to be a matter of course. To man, on the contrary, they are a problem, of which even the most uncultured and narrow-minded person is at certain more lucid moments vividly aware, but which enters the more distinctly and permanently into everyone’s consciousness, the brighter and more reflective that consciousness is, and the more material for thinking he has acquired through culture.”  - Arthur Schopenhauer


8. “The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”- Arthur Schopenhauer

9. “The lower a man is in an intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence itself is to him; on the contrary, everything, how it is and that it is, seems to him a matter of course.”- Arthur Schopenhauer


10. “The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.”- Arthur Schopenhauer

11. “The striving we see everywhere hindered in many ways, everywhere in conflict, and therefore always under the form of suffering. Thus, if there is no final end of striving, there is no measure and end of suffering.” - Arthur Schopenhauer


12. “The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other.”- Arthur Schopenhauer

13. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”- Arthur Schopenhauer