Arthur Schopenhauer

"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."

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

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

"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."

"After your death you will be what you were before your birth."

"Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!"

"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal."

"Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death."

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

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

"I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage."

"It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character."

"Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability."

"Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies."

"Music is the melody whose text is the world."

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

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

"Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed."

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

"The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity."

"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."

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

"We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success."

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