We must not expect very much from life, but learn to accommodate ourselves to a world where all is relative and no perfect state exists.
Let us look misfortune in the face and meet it with courage and calmness!
Fate is cruel and men are miserable. Life is synonymous with suffering; positive happiness a fata morgana, an illusion.
Only negative happiness, the cessation of suffering, is possible, and can be obtained by the annihilation of the Will-to-Live.
But it is not suicide that can deliver us from the pains of existence.
Suicide, according to Schopenhauer, frustrates the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. For death merely destroys the phenomenon, that is, the body, and never my inmost being, or the universal Will.
Suicide can deliver me merely from my phenomenal existence, and not from my real self, which can not die.
How, then, can man be released from this life of misery and pain? Where is the road that leads to Salvation?
Slow and weary is the way of redemption.
The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the intellect from its creator and despot, the Will.