Arthur Schopenhauer

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

"Money is human happiness in the abstract."

"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped."

"Fame is something which must be won honour is something which must not be lost."

"Compassion is the basis of all morality."

"Hatred comes from the heart contempt from the head and neither feeling is quite within our control."

"Money is human happiness in the abstract he then who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money."

"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."

"If you want to know your true opinion of someone watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him."

"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 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."

"The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else and run away even before he comes near them the fly lights upon his very nose."

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

"Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the business man."

"Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately."

"We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us."

"Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror."

"[I]n other words, we should live with due knowledge of the course of things in the world. For whenever a man in any way loses self-control, or is struck down by a misfortune, grows angry, or loses heart, he shows in this way that he finds things different from what he expected, and consequently that he laboured under a mistake, did not know the world and life, did not know how at every step the will of the individual is crossed and thwarted by the chance of inanimate nature, by contrary aims and intentions, even by the malice inspired in others. Therefore either he has not used his reason to arrive at a general knowledge of this characteristic of life, or he lacks the power of judgement, when he does not again recognize in the particular what he knows in general, and when he is therefore surprised by it and loses his self-control. Thus every keen pleasure is an error, an illusion, since no attained wish can permanently satisfy, and also because every possession and every happiness is only lent by chance for an indefinite time, and can therefore be demanded back in the next hour. Thus both originate from defective knowledge. Therefore the wise man always holds himself aloof from jubilation and sorrow, and no event disturbs his ἀταραξία [ataraxia]."—from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Paye in two volumes: volume I, p. 88"

"To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them."

"If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom."