The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

Schopenhauer is attacking a scholarly vice he saw as endemic: writers borrowing authority by citing others inaccurately. The sting of the remark lies in its inversion—what “honesty” exists is not shown in faithful quotation but is “discernible” precisely in the brazen, self-serving misquotation of predecessors. The line reflects his broader suspicion of academic fashion and secondhand learning: authors often prefer rhetorical advantage, speed, or polemical effect over fidelity to sources. Read this way, the quote is less about occasional error than about a culture of intellectual carelessness (or opportunism) that corrodes trust in scholarship and turns citation into a tool of persuasion rather than a record of truth.