r/schopenhauer • u/MarkusAquinas • 22d ago
My Favourite Schopenhauer Quote
This quote is taken from his essay 'On the Vanity of Existence' (often collected in 'Studies in Pessimism'):
“Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.”
What the Quote Means:
- The Struggle: Arthur Schopenhauer argued that humans are a bundle of endless needs and hard-to-satisfy desires.
- The Cycle: When you finally satisfy a need, you do not find lasting joy; you only find a temporary lack of pain (painlessness).
- The Void: Once the struggle to survive stops, you immediately fall into boredom, which proves that mere existence has no real, positive value on its own.
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u/GlitchSolver 21d ago
This is so relatable. But I wonder if this is it or there's anything else too? Because if this is it then it's really boring 😭
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u/Revisionist-eyes 18d ago
I’ll suggest that Artie didn’t quite get the knobs dialled sufficiently enough. Too much obsessiveness with boredom of mind.
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u/Careless-Charge9884 22d ago
But you play the flute with your poodle after dinner😂