Arthur Schopenhauer: "No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose"

• "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see".

• "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident".

• "Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude".

• "If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him".

Antonio Nunziante

• "The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice".

• "To live alone is the fate of all great souls".

Antonio Nunziante

• "Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company".

• "A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations".

• "Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal".

• "Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money".

Antonio Nunziante

• "In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head".

• "Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first".

• "Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other".

• "The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom".

• "They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person".

• "The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value".

• "Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point".

• "National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right".

• "Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another".

• "The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness".

• "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents".

• "Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity".

• "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".

• "Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see".

• "Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head".

• "There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over".

Antonio Nunziante

• "It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are".

• "Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost".

• "Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark".

• "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".

• "The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite".

• "Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own".

• "Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour".

Arthur Schopenhauer by Johann Schafer, 1859 | Frankfurt University Library

• "Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right".

• "In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods".

• "Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors".

• "The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust".

• "Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect".

• "The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for".

• "The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming".

• "To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away".

• "It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us".

• "Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly".

Antonio Nunziante

• "To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them".

• "Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see".

• "The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience".

• "Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man".

• "It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else".

• "... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them".

Antonio Nunziante

• "We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people".

• "We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor".

• "The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short".

Antonio Nunziante

• "Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no".

• "real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life-the craving for which is the very essence of our being-were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing".

• "Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, 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, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes".

• "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".

Antonio Nunziante

• "No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose".

• "Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties".

• "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man".

• "Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection".

• "We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness".

• "If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner".

• "It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause".

• "Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost".

Antonio Nunziante

• "The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it".

• "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents".

• "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other".

• "If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it".

• "Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal".

• "Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness".

Antonio Nunziante

• "Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame".

• "To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived".

• "The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy".

• "Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced".

• "He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts".

• "To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish".

• "Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax".

Antonio Nunziante

Antonio Nunziante