Essays II. Counsels and Maxims

Counsels and Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer

The second volume of his late masterpiece Parerga and Paralipomena-is the darkest, wittiest, and most brutally useful self-help book ever written.

"Most men are as unhappy as they are because they have never learned how to be unhappy in the right way."

Forget sugar-coated self-help. Here is the blackest, funniest, most ruthlessly practical handbook on surviving human existence ever written.

In these essays (the second half of his late-life masterpiece Parerga and Paralipomena), Schopenhauer strips away every illusion and hands you the operating manual for a suffering world:

• Why the majority of mankind is intellectually and morally unbearable (and how to avoid them)
• Why fame is a mask eaten by moths and love a biological trap
• Why solitude is the only refuge of the higher mind
• Why money is only useful up to the point where it stops buying freedom
• How to arrange your days, your books, and even your furniture so the blind Will does the least damage

There is no consolation here, only clarity. Schopenhauer's counsel is savage, precise, and strangely liberating: accept the worst, expect nothing, want little, and you will suffer less than the fools who chase happiness like dogs chasing their own tails.

Nietzsche called it "the most personal and useful book in world literature."