Quote

If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones for life is short, and time and energy limited.

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
Men
Books
Time
Point
Life
Read
Energy
Avoiding
Book
Limited
Must
Short
Make
Ones
Good
Wants

More quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

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We see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce forever all the pleasure of life and the aims till then pursued so keenly, or cheerfully and willingly give up life itself.
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Everything that happens, happens of necessity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.
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To call the world God is not to explain it it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.
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You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.
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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Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately
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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I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.
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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There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Das Ganze der Erfahrung gleicht einer Geheimschrift und die Philosophie der Entzifferung derselben. The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect the second have a much longer duration but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.
Arthur Schopenhauer