Life & Mortality Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer turns the social ritual of saying goodbye into a rehearsal for extinction. “Every parting” isn’t just sadness; it’s a miniature death, a sudden removal of what felt like a stable piece of the world. The line works because it refuses to treat loss as exceptional. It smuggles metaphysics into the everyday: attachments are not sweet add-ons to life but the very sites where life’s impermanence becomes legible.

The second clause sharpens the blade. A “reunion” isn’t pure joy; it carries the ghost of what could have been permanent separation. Calling it “a hint of the resurrection” is Schopenhauer at his most provocatively Christian while remaining fundamentally skeptical. He borrows resurrection language not to preach doctrine but to name a psychological jolt: the returned person feels briefly impossible, as if time’s verdict has been reversed. That’s the subtextual trick - he uses religious imagery as emotional shorthand, then leaves you with the implication that we crave metaphysical guarantees because our daily experience keeps staging their absence.

Context matters: Schopenhauer’s philosophy is famously anti-optimist, suspicious of the stories we tell to make suffering tolerable. Here, he suggests that the drama of separation and return is the mind’s training ground for larger consolations: death and the wish to outwit it. The quote’s intent is not comfort but exposure. It reveals how quickly ordinary affection becomes an argument with mortality, and how even our happiest reunions carry the quiet panic of contingency.