Arthur Schopenhauer — "The world is a machine for grinding out suffering."
The world is a machine for grinding out suffering.
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More from Arthur Schopenhauer
"It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured…"
"No man is happy; he can only strive to be so."
"Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations."
"The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary."
"The greatest happiness for man is to escape the necessity of being born."
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.