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"The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering from positive evil."
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"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."

"Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them."

"The saints have to 'drink poison' (worldly suffering) and the world has to 'drink nectar' (worldly pleasures). Because people are weak."

"The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in "The Book of Disquiet of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. "I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real " only then do I find myself comforted."

"Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence."

"No one is without troubles, without personal hardships and genuine challenges. That fact may not be obvious because most people don't advertise their woes and heartaches. But nobody, not even the purest heart, escapes life without suffering battle scars."

"It was well said-by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think-that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable."
Explore more quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer

"Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company."

"Education stuffs you full of ideas without the coinciding experience that gave rise to those ideas in the first place, giving you incorrect perspective and notions."

"I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow."

"In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods."

"One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured."
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