Key Ideas
The world is my representation.
The Will as thing-in-itself.
Music as a copy of the Will itself.
Compassion as the foundation of morality.
Salvation through denial of the will — as taught by saints, Buddhists and the Upanishads.
Expanded with a second volume in 1844. Read by Wagner, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Borges.
Lines to Remember
2 quotationsLife swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
Context & when to use it
For hedonic treadmill, pessimism, the restlessness of desire.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
Context & when to use it
For genius and vision.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsThe Will
Schopenhauer’s name for the thing-in-itself — a blind, aimless, insatiable striving that expresses itself in everything, from gravity to human desire.
Samuel Beckett
Irish playwright, novelist and poet who wrote in English and French, the master of minimalism and the absurd — Waiting for Godot made a play in which “nothing happens, twice” into the defining drama of the twentieth century.
Saṃsāra
“Wandering” — the beginningless cycle of birth, death and rebirth through which beings pass according to their karma, and from which every major Indian religion seeks release.
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
The “Great Forest” Upanishad, oldest and longest, home of Yājñavalkya’s debates, the teaching to Maitreyī, and “neti neti”.
Aśvaghoṣa
The 1st–2nd century Buddhist poet and dramatist — author of the Buddhacarita, the first full epic of the Buddha’s life, and the Saundarananda — often called the first great poet of classical Sanskrit, before Kālidāsa.
Mirza Ghalib
The greatest poet of Urdu (1797–1869) — master of the ghazal, of wit, paradox, grief and doubt — who lived through the fall of the Mughal world in 1857 and wrote its elegy in letters and verse.