Last updated: November 3, 2026

“Life is suffering” is usually attributed to the Buddha, but he never said it in those words. It is a popular English summary of the First Noble Truth, which teaches that birth, ageing, sickness, death and not getting what we want are dukkha, unsatisfying and painful, and that the cause is craving. The philosopher who really did write that all life is suffering was Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 to 1860). In The World as Will and Representation he argued that all life is essentially suffering, because it is driven by a blind, insatiable will that can never be satisfied for long.

So the honest answer to “which philosopher said life is suffering?” is: the Buddha said something close to it, Schopenhauer said it outright, and Schopenhauer himself believed the two were saying the same thing. They were not, quite. Both start from the same observation about desire and dissatisfaction, but one offers a path out and the other mostly offers a well-argued shrug. That difference is what the meme above is about, and what this post untangles.

Know the Work Rules

The meme borrows the format of a workplace training cartoon titled “Know the work rules”. In the top panel, labelled APPROPRIATE, a man in a suit with the serene face of the Buddha leans on a colleague’s desk and says: “Life is suffering.” The woman at the desk melts, hand on heart: “Awww, you’re sweet.” In the bottom panel, labelled INAPPROPRIATE, a pudgy man in a sweater vest with the face of Arthur Schopenhauer, white hair flying, says exactly the same words. The same woman is already on the phone: “Hello, Human Resources?!”

The original cartoon is a joke about double standards: the same line, delivered by an attractive man and an unattractive one, gets opposite reactions. Swapping in two philosophers makes a sharper point than it seems. The sentence is identical; the reception depends entirely on the frame. From the Buddha it sounds like the opening of a compassionate diagnosis. From Schopenhauer it sounds like a threat. And the meme is right about the frames, because the two men meant different things by the same words.

It also gets Schopenhauer’s reputation right. He was famously difficult. He quarrelled with his mother, the successful novelist Johanna Schopenhauer, insulted most of the academic philosophers of his day, and in 1821 was sued by a seamstress, Caroline Marquet, whom he had pushed out of his apartment hallway. A court ordered him to pay her a quarterly sum for the rest of her life. When she died, he is said to have noted in his account book: obit anus, abit onus, the old woman dies, the burden departs. HR would indeed have had questions.

Who Said “Life Is Suffering”?

Because the phrase is searched so often, it is worth sorting the candidates. The first is the Buddha, whose first sermon, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, states the truth of dukkha by listing experiences: birth, ageing and death, sorrow and despair, being joined to what one dislikes, being separated from what one loves, not getting what one wants. It never says “life is suffering” as a blanket sentence, and dukkha covers stress and unsatisfactoriness as well as pain. Our post on the First Noble Truth goes through the text and the translation problem.

The second candidate is Schopenhauer, and here the attribution is exact. In the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation, first published at the end of 1818, he concludes that all life is essentially suffering, alles Leben Leiden ist. The third is older still: the Greek wisdom of Silenus, preserved in Aristotle and retold by Nietzsche, that the best thing for human beings is never to be born. And there is a modern impostor. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” is widely attributed to Nietzsche, but it comes from Gordon Allport’s preface to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, summarising Frankl’s view. In recent years the psychologist Jordan Peterson has made “life is suffering” a recurring line in his lectures and books, usually crediting Buddhism, which is one reason the question keeps being asked.

Schopenhauer’s World of Endless Wanting

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not a mood but a metaphysics. Following Kant, he held that the world we perceive is representation, appearance shaped by our minds. But where Kant thought the thing in itself unknowable, Schopenhauer claimed we have one inside view of it: our own will, experienced as striving, desire and bodily drive. Will, he concluded, is the inner nature of everything, a blind, purposeless urge that shows itself in gravity, in plants growing towards light, in animal hunger and in human ambition. We explore the Kantian background in Kant’s Thing-in-Itself.

From this, suffering follows almost mechanically. To will is to lack something, and lack is pain. If we fail to get what we want, we suffer. If we succeed, satisfaction is brief, because the will immediately fastens on something new, or else we sink into boredom. Life, in his most famous image, swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom. Satisfaction, he wrote, is “always negative only, and never positive”: it is merely the removal of a pain, never a good in its own right.

He drove the point home with a thought experiment in his essay on the suffering of the world. Whoever wants to test the claim that pleasure outweighs pain, he suggests, should compare the feelings of an animal that is eating another with those of the animal being eaten. It is a brutal image, and deliberately so. The world, for Schopenhauer, is not a place designed for our happiness, and any philosophy that says otherwise is, in his word, wicked optimism. Boredom, in this picture, is not a minor nuisance but the second pole of human misery: the experience of existence itself once wanting has nothing to fasten on. Schopenhauer saw entertainment, gossip and gambling as desperate attempts to fill that emptiness, an observation that has not dated as much as one might hope. His reflections on freedom of the will, which follow from the same metaphysics, are in Man Can Do What He Wants, But Cannot Want What He Wants.

How Schopenhauer Found the Buddha

Schopenhauer was one of the first major European philosophers to take Indian thought seriously, and he did so with enthusiasm. In Weimar in 1813 and 1814 the orientalist Friedrich Majer introduced him to the Oupnek’hat, a Latin translation by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron of a Persian version of the Upanishads. Schopenhauer later called the Upanishads the consolation of his life, and of his death. Buddhism came later and more slowly, through the scattered reports and translations available in the first half of the nineteenth century, which he read and annotated as they appeared.

He insisted that he had developed his system before he knew much about Buddhism, and that the agreement was therefore all the more striking. In the second volume of his main work he wrote that if he were to take the results of his philosophy as the standard of truth, he would have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the other religions. Late in life he bought a gilded statue of the Buddha for his apartment in Frankfurt. His knowledge, however, was limited by the sources of his time, and modern scholars of Buddhism have pointed out where his reading projected his own system onto the texts. The parallel story of his Hindu sources is told in Schopenhauer and Hinduism.

Same Diagnosis, Different Medicine

Schopenhauer was right that the overlap is striking. Set side by side, the two views agree on more than most comparisons between ancient Asian and modern European thought.

The agreements are real. Both locate the root of suffering not in external circumstances but in desire itself. Both treat the separate self as less real than it seems. Both make compassion the heart of ethics; Schopenhauer’s prize essay On the Basis of Morality (1840) argues that only compassion, the direct participation in another’s suffering, gives actions moral worth. But the last two rows of the table matter more than the first five.

Schopenhauer even borrowed his favourite formula for compassion from the Upanishads: tat tvam asi, “that thou art”. When I feel another’s pain as if it were mine, he argued, I see through the veil of Maya, the illusion of separate individuals, and recognise the same will suffering in both of us. A Buddhist would phrase it differently, without a single underlying will, but would recognise the move: compassion grows as the boundary between “me” and “you” loosens. It is one of the few places where a European philosopher of the nineteenth century and an Indian teacher of the fifth century BC reach for nearly the same words.

Where the Buddha and Schopenhauer Part Ways

The first difference is metaphysical. Schopenhauer explained suffering by a single cosmic principle, the will, which exists in itself behind all appearances. The Buddha, as the early texts present him, refused to answer speculative questions about whether the world is eternal or what lies behind it, comparing someone who insists on such answers to a man struck by a poisoned arrow who will not let the surgeon remove it until he knows the name of the archer. Buddhism explains suffering through conditions and causes, not through a hidden absolute, and its teaching of not-self sits uneasily with Schopenhauer’s one great Will.

The second difference is the cure. The Buddha’s first sermon begins by rejecting two extremes, indulgence and self-torment, and calls the path between them the Middle Way. It is a training open to anyone, lay or monastic, in ethics, attention and understanding. Schopenhauer’s ideal is closer to the extreme the Buddha rejected. Liberation, for him, is the denial of the will to live, achieved by rare saints through asceticism, chastity and voluntary poverty. For ordinary mortals he offers temporary relief through art, especially music, which he considered a direct copy of the will itself, and through compassion. It is a beautiful consolation, but it is a consolation, not a path.

The third difference is tone, and it is the one the meme captures. The Four Noble Truths move from diagnosis to prognosis to treatment: the third truth announces that suffering can end. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is largely diagnosis. That is why the Buddha sounds kind in the first panel and Schopenhauer alarming in the second. One is a doctor telling you that you are ill and how to recover; the other is a brilliant pathologist explaining why everyone is ill and most will stay that way.

Craving and Will: A Closer Look

The closest point of contact between the two systems is also where the differences become most instructive. The Buddha’s second noble truth names the cause of dukkha as taṇhā, literally thirst, and divides it into three kinds: craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming. Schopenhauer’s will looks like the first two combined: a hunger for satisfaction and a drive to go on existing, which he called the will to live.

The third kind is the interesting one. The Buddha counts the desire to stop existing as part of the problem, not as the solution. Schopenhauer reached a structurally similar insight by a different route. He argued that suicide is not a denial of the will at all but a strong affirmation of it: the person who ends their life still wants life, only not the life they have, and rejects the circumstances rather than the willing. Real liberation, for him, is the quieting of wanting itself, not the destruction of the one who wants. On this narrow but important point the German pessimist and the Indian teacher agree, and both would reject the popular idea that their philosophies recommend escaping existence by force.

Where they differ is in what remains when craving or will falls silent. For the Buddha this is a state of freedom that can be realised in this life, in the middle of ordinary activity, as the stories of the Buddha teaching for decades after his awakening show. For Schopenhauer it is almost unimaginable from the inside, glimpsed only in the lives of saints and in rare moments of aesthetic contemplation, when we lose ourselves in a piece of music or a landscape and briefly stop wanting anything at all.

Nirvana and Nothingness

Schopenhauer ended the first volume of his main work with one of the most famous last sentences in philosophy. For those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, he wrote, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, is nothing. In the same passage he connected this “nothing” with the Buddhist Prajñāpāramitā, the perfection of wisdom that goes beyond all knowing, and with the mystics’ talk of absorption in God. He was careful to add that this nothing is relative: it looks like nothing only from the standpoint of the will, which cannot imagine its own absence as anything else.

Buddhist texts handle the question with even more caution. Asked whether an awakened one exists after death, does not exist, both or neither, the Buddha of the early discourses declines all four options, comparing the question to asking in which direction a fire has gone when it goes out. Nirvana, literally the blowing out of a flame, is described as the end of greed, hatred and delusion, and as peace, but not as annihilation. Nineteenth-century Europeans, including Schopenhauer’s readers, often heard “nothingness” in it and either feared or welcomed a religion of extinction. Many later scholars think they were projecting their own debates onto texts that were more interested in practice than in metaphysics.

The difference matters for anyone who comes to these ideas in a dark moment. Schopenhauer’s nothing is the vanishing of a world experienced as torment. The Buddhist goal is described as the end of torment within the world, and the path to it begins with ordinary things: honest speech, decent work, attention to what is actually happening. One of them invites you to admire the abyss; the other hands you a set of practices for the morning.

Pessimism or Realism?

Schopenhauer’s critics have always enjoyed pointing out that he did not live like a saint. He ate well, dressed elegantly, played the flute daily and kept a succession of poodles, usually named Atma, after the Sanskrit word for the self. Nietzsche, who began as his admirer and ended as his critic, mocked him in Beyond Good and Evil as a pessimist, a denier of God and the world, who nonetheless played the flute every evening after dinner. Nietzsche’s deeper objection was that Schopenhauer’s denial of the will was a sign of exhausted life, and that the right response to suffering is affirmation, not escape. We follow that turn in What Is Nihilism?.

Yet Schopenhauer’s pessimism has survived its critics. It anticipated Freud’s idea of unconscious drives, shaped Wagner, Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy, and lives on in modern antinatalism, which turns his diagnosis into an argument against having children, discussed in our post on antinatalism. It also has a defence that sounds strikingly modern: compared with the relentless cheerfulness of motivational culture, a philosopher who insists that dissatisfaction is normal can feel like a relief. Some psychologists have even argued, controversially, that mildly depressed people judge certain things more accurately than the optimistic majority, a debate we cover in Antipsychiatry and Its Critics.

Finding a Philosophical Balance

So who is right? If the question is whether desire breeds dissatisfaction, both are, and modern psychology has a name for part of it, the hedonic treadmill: we adapt to good fortune and soon want more. If the question is what follows, the Buddha has the better argument. A diagnosis that admits no treatment invites despair; a diagnosis with a demanding but realistic treatment invites practice. Schopenhauer saw the illness more vividly than almost anyone in the Western tradition, and the Buddha would have recognised the symptoms. He would not have accepted the prognosis.

The meme’s HR department, in other words, has done its job. “Life is suffering” followed by a path is an invitation; “life is suffering” followed by a sigh is a complaint. If you need help choosing your panel, the slider below offers both the Buddha’s instruction and Schopenhauer’s more honest summary of his own social life. And if you are looking for a third way, Camus suggested one that neither of them considered: to revolt against the absurd and still imagine Sisyphus happy, as explained in One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy.