The Wisdom of Life

Published in 1851 as part of Schopenhauer's late-career miscellany Parerga und Paralipomena, The Wisdom of Life is the book that finally won him a popular audience after a lifetime of obscurity. He sets aside the metaphysics of his magnum opus to ask a more direct question: of all the things that befall a man — his health and temperament, his property, his reputation in the eyes of others — which actually determine whether his life feels worth living? His answer, that what a man is matters incomparably more than what he has or what others think of him, is delivered with the dry severity and aphoristic precision that made him Tolstoy's, Nietzsche's, and Freud's quiet teacher. Translated by T. Bailey Saunders in 1890.