Quotes from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“The flower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“He who would be everything cannot be anything.”)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house-that much of our behavior is governed by forced outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud’s unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud’s birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forced and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence—our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. For they are just the failings of mankind to which we also belong and accordingly we have all the same failings buried within ourselves. We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Some cannot loosen their own chains yet can nonetheless liberate their friends. —Nietzsche”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“marriage a debt that is contracted in youth and paid in old age….”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless every man desires to reach old age…a state of life of which it may be said “it is bad today, and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Some said living with cancer had made them wiser, more self-realized, while others had reordered their priorities in life, grown stronger, learned to say no to activities they no longer valued and yes to things that really mattered—such as loving their family and friends, observing the beauty about them, savoring the changing seasons.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“(...) Arthur ne aminteşte adesea (şi lui însuşi) că emoţia are puterea de a ascunde şi de a falsifica cunoaşterea; că lumea întreagă capătă un aspect senin atunci când avem motive să ne bucurăm şi unul întunecat şi posomorât atunci când ne copleşeşte părerea de rău”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you wish.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“One cold winter’s day a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order, through their mutual warmth, to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effects of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now, when the need for warmth once again brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so they were tossed between two evils, until they discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the needs for society, which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities once more drive them apart.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Trăiește cum trebuie și ai încredere că vei da celorlalți lucruri bune, chiar dacă tu nu vei afla niciodată asta.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“من نیز با پیروی از فروید اغلب رؤیاپرداز را کوتوله ی فربه و سرحالی تصور می کنم که در دل جنگل دندریت ها و اکسون ها، زندگی خوبی برای خود دست و پا کرده است. روزها می خوابد ولی شب ها، با وزوز و همهمه ی سیناپس ها سر از نازبالشش برمی دارد، نوشابه ی عسلی اش را می نوشد و با تنبلی، رشته ی رؤیاهای میزبانش را درهم می تند... به قصه های مضحک پریان شبیه است. درست همان انسان انگاری رایج قرن نوزدهم. همان خطای متداول فروید در عینی نمایاندن ساختارهای انتزاعی ذهن و مبدل ساختنشان به جن و پری هایی مستقل و مختار. فقط کاش من هم باورش نداشتم! ”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Were you really, truly, helpful to your patients? Maybe you've just learned to pick patients who were going to improve on their own anyway.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“This world is supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

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Popular quotes

“Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.”
― John Lloyd, quote from The Book of General Ignorance

“Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin

“When it's all said and done, the only thing that matter in life are so damn simple. Family, friends. being safe and well. I think before the war a lot of people got sucked in by the crap on TV. They thought having the right shoes or the right jeans or the right car really mattered. Boy were we ever dumb.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Night Is for Hunting

“She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi's eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from The Thing Around Your Neck

“If we were going to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. [...] we'd walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. [...]

First we'd test the battery to see if any juice was left in it. We'd attach two wires to the positive and negative ends and connect them to a torch bulb. The brighter the bulb, the stronger the battery. Next we'd flatten the Shake Shake carton and roll it into a tube, then stack the batteries inside, making sure the positives and negatives faced in the same direction. Then we'd run wires from each end of the stack to the positive and negative heads inside the radio, where the batteries normally go. Together, this stack of dead batteries usually contained enough juice to power a radio.”
― William Kamkwamba, quote from The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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