Arthur Schopenhauer — "The only way to escape the suffering of life is to commit suicide."
The only way to escape the suffering of life is to commit suicide.
The only way to escape the suffering of life is to commit suicide.
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"The character of a man is formed by what he does when he is alone."
"Great minds are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude."
"The world is just a dream, but a very bad one."
"The greatest happiness is not to be born."
"We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey."
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.
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