Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes About Desire
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Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
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To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
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Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
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It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of possessions.
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Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
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To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake
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We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life
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The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
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The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.
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Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious... and consequently the concentration of all desire
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It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer
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Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.
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Pride works _from within_; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
- Born: February 22, 1788
- Died: September 21, 1860
- Occupation: Philosopher