The Wisdom of Life: What a Man Is

Arthur Schopenhauer was famous as the great pessimist of philosophy: he believed that life is mostly suffering.Yet late in life he wrote a practical guide to living as happily as possible, and it became his most popular book.

“The differences in human fortune can be reduced to three classes.First, what a man is: his personality in the widest sense, including health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence and education.Second, what a man has: property and possessions of every kind.Third, how a man stands in the eyes of others: his honour, his rank and his reputation.The first class matters far more than the other two, because nature herself made these differences, while the others are only human arrangements.Compared with real personal advantages, such as a great mind or a great heart, all the privileges of rank or birth are like kings on the stage compared with kings in real life.

The world in which a man lives is shaped mainly by the way he looks at it, so it is different for different people: to one it is empty and dull, to another rich, interesting and full of meaning.Every man is shut up inside his own consciousness, and he can no more get out of it than he can get out of his own skin.All the pride and pleasure in the world, seen by the dull mind of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

Health outweighs all other blessings so much that one may really say that a healthy beggar is happier than a sick king.In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on health alone. With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing can be enjoyed.It follows that the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness: for money, for promotion, for learning or for fame.What a man is in himself, what goes with him when he is alone, what no one can give him or take away, is plainly more important than anything he owns, or whatever he may be in the eyes of the world.”