Aphorisms of Everyday Wisdom

"Aphorisms of Everyday Wisdom" is one of the sections of the first volume of the collection "Parerga und Paralipomena" ("Additions and Omissions", 1851) by the outstanding German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). It is a kind of eudaimonistic treatise - a... guide to "the art of living one's life as pleasantly and happily as possible". In the introduction, the pessimist Schopenhauer writes that his philosophy denies the correspondence of human life to the concept of happy existence - one that could be preferred to non-existence. Schopenhauer is forced to compromise and look at happiness not from the highest, metaphysical-ethical point of view, but from the ordinary, empirical perspective. The result of this philosophical compromise became the actual book - "a guide to happy existence", written by a person convinced that such existence is impossible.