Arthur Schopenhauer — "The greatest happiness for man is to escape the necessity of being born."
The greatest happiness for man is to escape the necessity of being born.
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More from Arthur Schopenhauer
"Reading is merely a substitute for thinking for oneself."
"It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else."
"The world is a bad joke."
"The animal enjoys the present without the burden of memory or anxiety about the future; man, on the other hand, is tormented by reflection."
"Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called health."
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.