'The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it,' says Socrates.
'Life is that which should not be—an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life,' says Schopenhauer.
'All that is in the world: folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief—are vanity and emptiness. Man dies and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid,' says Solomon.
'To live in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible—we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life,' says Buddha.
And what these strong minds said, has been said and thought and felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have thought it and felt it.
One cannot deceive oneself. It is all—vanity! Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life.
Then I began to consider the lives of the men of my own kind; and I found that they met the problem in one or other of four ways.
The first way was that of ignorance. Some people—mostly women, or very young or very dull people—have not yet understood the question of life; but I, having understood it, could not again shut my eyes.
The second way was that of the Epicureans, expressed by Solomon when he said: 'Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.'
That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is an accidental advantage, and that not every one can have a thousand wives and a thousand palaces like Solomon, and that for every man with a thousand wives there are a thousand without wives, and that for each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has to-day made me a Solomon, may to-morrow make me Solomon's slave. The dullness of these people's imaginations enables them to forget what gave no peace to Buddha—the inevitability of sickness, age and death, which to-day or to-morrow will destroy all these pleasures. I could not imitate these people: I had not their dullness of imagination, and I could not artificially produce it in myself.