s that would
otherwise bring him to despair; and though he has no pleasures, no
joys and no friends, he can rest in and on himself; so powerful is the
comfort to be derived from a vivid consciousness of this advantage; a
comfort to be preferred to every other earthly blessing. Contrarily,
nothing in the world can relieve a man who knows his own
worthlessness; all that he can do is to conceal it by deceiving people
or deafening them with his noise; but neither expedient will serve him
very long.

* * * * *

We must always try to preserve large views. If we are arrested by
details we shall get confused, and see things awry. The success or the
failure of the moment, and the impression that they make, should count
for nothing.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Schopenhauer, for some reason that
is not apparent, wrote this remark in French.]

* * * * *

How difficult it is to learn to understand oneself, and clearly to
recognise what it is that one wants before anything else; what it is,
therefore, that is most immediately necessary to our happiness; then
what comes next; and what takes the third and the fourth place, and so
on.

Yet, without this knowledge, our life is planless, like a captain
without a compass.

* * * * *

The sublime melancholy which leads us to cherish a lively conviction
of the worthlessness of everything of all pleasures and of all
mankind, and therefore to long for nothing, but to feel that life is
merely a burden which must be borne to an end that cannot be very
distant, is a much happier state of mind than any condition of desire,
which, be it never so cheerful, would have us place a value on the
illusions of the world, and strive to attain them.

This is a fact which we learn from experience; and it is clear, _a
priori_, that one of these is a condition of illusion, and the other
of knowledge.

Whether it is better to marry or not to marry is a question which in
very many cases amounts to this: Are the cares of love more endurable
than the anxieties of a livelihood?

* * * * *

Marriage is a trap which nature sets for us. [1]

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Also in French.]

* * * * *

Poets and philosophers who are married men incur by that very fact the
suspicion that they are looking to their own welfare, and not