Arthur Schopenhauer

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

In early youth as we contemplate our coming life we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.

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

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed in the second it is opposed in the third it is regarded as self-evident.

It is in trifles and when he is off his guard that a man best shows his character.

The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.

Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes ennui of the higher ones.

Pride ... is the direct appreciation of oneself.

Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?

Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence with the certainty of losing it at last.

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.

(Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects whether moral or intellectual shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.

A man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

Time is that in which all things pass away.

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

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late look upon it as the quintessence of life and to a certain extent sacred.