The Will to Live Quotes

“[...] it is stated that in the world all is illusion, there is no reality in the things; all is empty. (Asiatic Researches, vol. xx. p. 434)”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“[..] life is essentially suffering, that this suffering arises from craving, particularly the craving for existence, and that the release from this suffering can only come from the release from blind craving itself. The Buddhist ideal is the state of Nirvana, wherein all desire, willing, and craving are put to rest, and with them, individuality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“A man might- in fact usually does- hurt others in response to his own insatiable selfishness, and this we disparage, but our sense of morality is not outraged. The pain he causes is the result of his unfeeling indifference, and he appears to us more as an insensitive animal, or one who knows no better, than as a satan. But that one should, knowing what pain is, make pain in another creature the very object of his interest and will, always evokes the deepest moral repugnance.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“Health and the joy of life are nowhere so apparent as in infants, who know nothing, and who are in the fullest sense protected from the world that we are supposed to believe is a refulgent and un-adulterated goodness. [...] Pain is what is positive, being actually felt, while pleasure is the negative, illusory thing, being identified simply with the absence of pain. Youth and health are good- but we do not feel them, nor attach any positive qualities to them, nor in any way sense them until they are lost in sickness and age- and the loss of them is felt most acutely”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“Things are lovely throughout nature in exact proportion to their rarity; ugliness is the norm towards which all things tend. Flowers appear briefly and wither quickly, but the dirt and manure from which they spring and to which they at once return endure indestructibly. Genius appears here and there, accidentally, among men, but it is forever engulfed in the ocean of stupidity that gives no hint of being accidental. And indeed, a man of genius can be rendered an idiot by the slightest physiological disturbance, but a dolt cannot be rendered a genius by all the powers of heaven and earth, so durable is that state”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“The whole world contradicts optimism, and if one is an optimist nonetheless, it is in deference to the claims of the heart rather than of the understanding. The minimum requirements of optimism would be, first, that life, or at least human life, has a rational purpose beyond the mere perpetuation of life which we share with the brutes; that we can apprehend this purpose intellectually, are free to pursue it, and that it is worthy of our endeavor- but not one of these claims can be borne out with any conviction. And the second, in order for optimism to be true there must be a genuine, positive goods in the world, and these must prevail, or give some promise of prevailing, over their opposites- but nothing seems less likely to be true.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“What is mortal in him, his own individuality, desires everything else, but counts for absolutely nothing.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“Passionate love, on the other hand, which serves no real interest of individuals and more often than not disdains these in its determination to achieve its own impersonal end, forms the basis of the least stable and most unhappy unions of wedlock, because its interests are not those of the individuals immediately concerned. We nevertheless, sensing the overwhelming importance of the ultimate end and the relative insignificance of those who are its means, approve this passion as the only proper motive.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“So long as we view this turmoil from the standpoint of the individual man and his private interests and aims, it appears senseless; but as soon as we regard the individual as the expression of a will that cares nothing for him, but only for existence as such and, accordingly, for its perpetuation, then what before was mysterious becomes familiar, and the riddles of passionate love are unfolded.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“In imagining, then, that in death one's ego or self or true nature perishes while the world remains, one turns the true state of things upside down; it is one's world, as an idea, that perishes with his brain, while his true nature, which is no individual thing, is untouched.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“The religious distortion of things, and the ease with which the vast majority of unthinking men embrace the faith to receive it, can be explained, however, in terms of the same will from which it is the business of established religions to divert our attention. For that will, we noted, is essentially, and in fact nothing more than, a force for existence, and cannot be satisfied with less than the promise of endless existence. That we should cease to exist, that we should live and so profoundly will our existence, only to face annihilation a few years hence, is a thought from which men recoil, not pausing to ask why such simple non-existence should be filled with such dread for them, but dreading it nonetheless. Is is from this calamity that religion promises salvation, and upon this promise its strength and appeal entirely rest. It is thus an utter distortion, and a naive one, to think of religion as filling the gaps in our speculative knowledge, as though our primary need were to learn the things we do not yet know, things that have no bearing upon what we will.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“Philosophers, meanwhile, invent arguments to convince us that what we find in the world is no true indication of what is going on there. [...] And even when the founders of world religions, as in the case of the Buddha, or the Christ, penetrate beyond human wish and pronounce the world to be infected with suffering and evil, and man's selif will to be the source of much of that evil, their teaching is soon wrapped in a rosy optimism by successive generations of disciples and epigones, so that it becomes, at their hands, very nearly the opposite of what it originally was.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“The blindness or purposelessness of this striving does not become wholly apparent, however, until we note that the fate of individual things had not the slightest significance in the general design. [...] nature cares only for the form or the species, and is wholly indifferent to its members. Life, both human and subhuman, arises in such profusion as to stagger our wits, yet it is all swept into nothingness as if by whim.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“That this will is blind means only that it has no further end than the mere perpetuation of existence- and bare existence, contrasted with existing for something, is the essence of meaninglessness. This fact eludes us so long as we have great designs and pruposes to claim our attention; we assume that these motivate us, and do not consider that they are themselves the arbitrary product of a will that has no design or purpose. This pointlessness of life, even of life that is filled with striving and achievement, becomes particularly apparent when we contemplate the vast panorama of non-human life, see the restless determination with which it is pursued, and then inquire into the purpose of it all.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“Every man naturally wills life, and the perpetuation of life, before ever giving thought to whether or not it is a good, and he still wills it in the face of any proof that is not. [...] No less does he who has gratified all his life's aims and is now reduced to boredom and meaningless crave to perpetuate his effete existence, for its own sake. We view with instinctive awe and terror preparations for the deliberate destruction of any man, and do not pause to consider the worth of that life.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“[...] we can in fact know what is the reality underlying appearances, because each of us is, in his own true nature, that reality. Certainly we do not know our true nature by rational inference, but we can be- and indeed are, if we but reflect on it- perfectly aware of it. And what we are is not just thought, but will; indeed, our thoughts, no less than our bodily activities, are nothing but the expression of this will which is our innermost nature. We know what reality is, as will, because we are ourseleves not merely the expression of will but identical with that will which underlies all phenomena.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“That is what Schopenhauer means by asserting that the world, as it exhibits itself to our senses is "an idea", an appearance within the knower himself and that, considered independently of any reality lying beyond it, it is, in all its vastness and dicersity, nothing.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings

“Schopenhauer's philosophy rests upon the Kantian distinction between what is, and what is rationally knowable. The world that one knows, the "phenomenal" world, is comprised entirely of one's own sensations and his rational interpretations of these. [...] If there is anything in the "noumeral" world, or the world as it is "in itself", that either corresponds or fails to correspond with this order, we cannot rationally know it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings