Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes on Life

Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation (1818, expanded 1844) presents human life as the manifestation, at the level of self-conscious individuality, of a single underlying metaphysical Will — striving without object, satisfaction without rest, pain when frustrated, boredom when satisfied. The pessimistic conclusion follows: ordinary human life oscillates between suffering and tedium, with momentary pleasures providing only the brief absence of pain. The way out, Schopenhauer argues, is the temporary self-forgetting of aesthetic contemplation — particularly through music, the most direct image of the Will — and the more lasting deliverance through ascetic denial of the will-to-life that he found anticipated in Buddhist and Christian mystical traditions.