Quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer

Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.

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.

The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering, from positive evil.

I observed once to Goethe ... that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself."

The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

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

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

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.

Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?