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Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Arthur Schopenhauer
Age: 72 †
Born: 1788
Born: February 22
Died: 1860
Died: September 21
Musicologist
Philosopher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Danzig
Thing
Probability
Confusion
Hope
Desire

More quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

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We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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It is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nurishes the wish.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Human existence is an error...it is bad today and every day it gets worse, until the worst happens.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another but women are by nature enemies.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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A happy life is impos­si­ble the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Money is human happiness in the abstract.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The weakness of their reasoning faculty also explains why women show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men... and why, on the contrary, they are inferior to men as regards justice, and less honourable and conscientious.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .
Arthur Schopenhauer
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All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else hence there is no ethics.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Talent works for money and fame the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.
Arthur Schopenhauer