Arthur Schopenhauer

“Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.”

“To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself.”

“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.”

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”

“Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”

“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.”

“In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.”

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

“We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.”

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

“All striving comes from lack, from a dissatisfaction with one's condition, and is thus suffering as long as it is not satisfied; but no satisfaction is lasting; instead, it is only the beginning of a new striving. We see striving everywhere inhibited in many ways, struggling everywhere; and thus always suffering; there is no final goal of striving, and therefore no bounds or end to suffering.”

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”

“Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.”

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

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

“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.”

“Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.”

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

“It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.”

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