Arthur Schopenhauer — "The greatest happiness is to be born, and the least to die."
The greatest happiness is to be born, and the least to die.
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More from Arthur Schopenhauer
"If a man wants to be happy, let him remain unmarried."
"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."
"It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain."
"The present is the only reality and the only certainty."
"The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable."
About Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
German philosopher of pessimism whose The World as Will and Representation (1819) defined the suffering-and-renunciation tradition. Closely associated with Immanuel Kant (the system Schopenhauer built on and revised). For an intellectual contrast, see G.W.F. Hegel, German Idealist of the rational unfolding of Spirit — Schopenhauer scheduled his Berlin lectures opposite Hegel's and spent decades attacking Hegel's optimistic system as deliberately mystifying nonsense — the foundational rivalry of 19th-century German philosophy.
The standard scholarly entry points to Arthur Schopenhauer's work: Bryan Magee (Oxford, populariser-philosopher) — The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983); Christopher Janaway (Southampton, Schopenhauer specialist) — Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy (1989); David E. Cartwright (Wisconsin–Whitewater) — Schopenhauer: A Biography (2010). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Arthur Schopenhauer.