"Thus old age and death, to which every life necessarily hurries, are a sentence of condemnation on the will-to-live which comes from the hands of nature herself. It states that this will is a striving that is bound to frustrate itself. “What you have willed,” it says, “ends thus: will something better.” Therefore the instruction afforded to everyone by his life consists on the whole in the fact that the objects of his desires constantly delude, totter, and fall; that in consequence they bring more misery than joy, until at last even the whole foundation on which they all stand collapses, since his life itself is destroyed. Thus he obtains the final confirmation that all his striving and willing was a perversity, a path of error."
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Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. E. F. J. Payne, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 (1966), CHAPTER XLVI - On the Vanity and Suffering of Life
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philosophical_pessimism
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Philosophical pessimism
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