Quote

Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.

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
Way
Ways
Would
Books
Astray
Wrong
Dry
Show
Followed
Read
Guidance
Shows
Serve
Book
Merely
Many
Thoughts

More quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

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Unrest is the mark of existence.
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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Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.
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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It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Mostly the loss teaches us only about the value of things.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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It is a clumsy experiment to make for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Music is the melody whose text is the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
Arthur Schopenhauer