On the Vanity and Suffering of Life

A person is at the mercy of boundless desires—nothing can satisfy their passions, their need to possess, since every fulfilled impulse gives birth to a new one. Other outstanding works by A. Schopenhauer include “On the Will in Nature,” “On Freedom of the Will,” “On the Foundation of Morality,” “Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics,” “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” and “The World as Will and Representation.”

Arthur Schopenhauer was called the “pessimist philosopher”: he believed the existing world is “the worst of all possible worlds,” in contrast to the German thinker Gottfried Leibniz.