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You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.

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
Moments
Nothing
Thing
Life
Definite
Absolutely
Moment
Given

More quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

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Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
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The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.
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A man of talent will strive for money and reputation but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name
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What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others.
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I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.
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Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately
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Pride works _from within_ it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
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Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to - better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.
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I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.
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Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
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Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
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It is only when a man is alone that he is really free.
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We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life
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The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
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It is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nurishes the wish.
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Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
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The eternal being..., as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
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The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
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Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
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The first rule for a good style is to have something to say in fact, this in itself is almost enough.
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