Quote

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.

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
Matter
Depends
Envious
Feel
Consciousness
Compare
Feels
State
Pleasant
Kind
Whether
Painful
Happy
Finally
Upon
Gratitude
States
Grateful
Better
Worse
Pervades

More quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

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It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.
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There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.
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The truth can wait, for it lives a long life.
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The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use
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The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
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I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.
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.
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The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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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Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.
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