Essays and Aphorisms

by Arthur Schopenhauer

But for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one's so-called ‘free time’, one will be allowed to get on with living.

as a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected.

children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of.