“Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow.”
More from Arthur Schopenhauer on Life
“If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.”
“Life is a constant process of dying.”
“I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.”
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
“A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
“The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.”
“Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.”
Others on Life
Jonathan Safran Foer
22 quotes“One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second”
Mitch Albom
18 quotes“Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
16 quotes“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
Henry Miller
15 quotes“We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”
Virginia Woolf
14 quotes“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Cormac McCarthy
14 quotes“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn...”
Lord Byron
14 quotes“The great art of life is sensation to feel that we exist even in pain.”
Joseph Campbell
14 quotes“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive...”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
13 quotes“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”
Margaret Atwood
13 quotes“Surviving Is the only warWe can afford”
Søren Kierkegaard
13 quotes“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”
Sarah Dessen
13 quotes“All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control....”