Arthur Schopenhauer

In the same way that fireworks and torches cannot be seen in the light of the sun, the best intellect and the greatest beauty cannot be seen in the light of the kindness of a single heart.

Every misconception is a poison; there are no harmless misconceptions.

It is difficult if not impossible to find some reasonable limit for acquiring more and more property.

Freeing a person from misconceptions, false truths, and lies does not take anything from him; it gives him something important.

In real life illusions can only transform our life for a moment, but in the domain of thoughts and the intellect, misconceptions may be accepted as truth for thousands of years, and make a laughingstock of whole nations, mute the noble wishes of mankind, make slaves from people and lie to them. These misconceptions are the enemies with which the wisest men in the history of mankind try to struggle. The force of the truth is great, but its victory is difficult. However, once you receive this victory, it can never be taken from you.

As our self-interest diminishes, our anxieties disappear, and then comes quiet and firm joy, which always diffuses us with a good spiritual disposition and a clear conscience. Every good deed helps to kindle this feeling of joy within us. The egoist feels lonely, surrounded by threatening and alien events; all his desires are sunk in his own concerns. A kind person lives in a world of beneficent events, whose goodness matches his own.

Someone told me once that every person has an element of good and an element of bad within him, and that either the good or the bad can be manifested according to the person’s mood. We possess within us two different ways of understanding this world. One is the feeling of being divided, distanced, and alienated from each other; in this state, all things seem gloomy to us. We feel nothing except jealousy, indifference, and hatred. I would like to call the opposite way of understanding the understanding of universal unification. In this state, all people seem very close to us, and all are equal among themselves. This state, therefore, arouses compassion and love in us.

Compassion for animals is closely connected with character type. You can say with confidence that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a kind man.

Every good or charitable action, every unprofitable assistance which supports other people in need, when we come to its origins and foundations, becomes a mysterious and unexplainable thing, because it comes out of the mysterious understanding of the unity of all living beings, and it can be explained by nothing else.

A work of art makes a great impression on us only when it gives us something which, even with all the efforts of our intellect, we cannot understand completely.

Only the truth which was acquired by your own thinking, through the efforts of your intellect, becomes a member of your own body, and only this truth really belongs to us.

Compassion for animals is so closely connected with kindness that you can truly say that a person cannot be kind if he is cruel to animals. Compassion for animals comes from the same source as compassion toward people.

It is a mistake to believe that we need obey no moral in our attitude to the animals, that we have no moral responsibilities to them. This way lies complete vulgarity and rudeness.

A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative. . . . That is why constant learning softens your brain. ... Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare’s remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries.