Works of Arthur Schopenhauer

A man who writes carelessly at once proves that he himself puts no great value on his own thoughts.

One need only look at a woman's shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work. She pays the debt of life not by what she does but by what she suffers-by the pains of child-bearing, care for the child, and by subjection to man, to whom she should be a patient and cheerful companion.

And yet nothing is easier than to write so that no one can understand; on the other hand, nothing is more difficult than to express learned ideas so that every one must understand them.

it reads more about Goethe than what has been written by Goethe, and industriously studies the legend of Faust in preference to Goethe's Faust itself.

That human life must be a kind of mistake is sufficiently clear from the fact that man is a compound of needs, which are difficult to satisfy; moreover, if they are satisfied, all he is granted is a state of painlessness, in which he can only give himself up to boredom. This is a precise proof that existence in itself has no value, since boredom is

While the writing of an author of the third, the rare class, is like a chase where the game has been captured beforehand and cooped up in some enclosure from which it is afterwards set free, so many at a time, into another enclosure, where it is not possible for it to escape, and the sportsman has now nothing to do but to aim and fire-that is to sa

Too much importance cannot be attached to this quality of seeing things for oneself; it is the stamp of a great and original mind; it is the principal quality of what one calls genius.

As soon as this is perceived the book should be thrown away, for time is precious.

Style is merely the silhouette of thought; and to write in a vague or bad style means a stupid or confused mind.