To affect a quality, and to plume yourself upon it, is just to confess that you do not have it. Whether it is courage, or learning, or intellect, or wit, or success with women, or riches, or social position, or whatever else it may be that a man boasts of, you may conclude by his boasting about it that this […]
This pulling out of the imagination which I am recommending, will also forbid us to summon up the memory of past misfortune, to paint a dark picture of the injustice or harm that has been done us, the losses we have sustained, the insults, slights and annoyances to which we have been exposed, for to do that is to arouse […]
Courage comes next to prudence as a quality of mind very essential to happiness… Our motto should be “No Surrender,” and far from yielding to the ills of life, let us take fresh courage from misfortune… Let our attitude be such that we would not quake even if the world fell in ruins about us. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
It is most important for anyone who is capable of higher and nobler thoughts to keep his mind from being so completely engrossed with private affairs and ungracious troubles as to let them take up all his attention and crowd out worthier matters, for that is, in a very real sense, to lose sight of the true end of life. […]
The chief result gained by experience is clearness of view. This is what distinguishes the man of mature age… it is only then that he sees things plainly, and takes them for what they really are, while in earlier years he saw a phantom-world, put together with the whims and imaginations of his own mind… the real world was hidden […]
A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument — perhaps a piano, which is a small orchestra in itself. Such a man is a small world in himself, and the effects produced by various instruments together, he produces all by himself, in the unity of his […]
No man can see over his own height. Let me explain what I mean. You cannot see in another man any more than you have in yourself. Your own level strictly determines the extent to which he comes within your understanding. If your intelligence is unawakened, mental qualities in another, even though they be of the highest kind, will have […]
Great minds are like eagles, and build their nests in some lofty solitude. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
It is very necessary that a man should be appraised early in life that it is a masquerade in which he finds himself, for otherwise, there are many things which he will fail to understand. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
Your friends will tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so. Let your enemies’ criticism be like a bitter medicine, to be used as a means of self-knowledge. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
