Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer is doing what he does best: smuggling a bleak worldview into a line that sounds, at first blush, almost optimistic. The alchemists chase gold, fail at the literal goal, and yet accidentally invent the scaffolding of modern chemistry. That arc flatters human curiosity while quietly demoting human intention. We don’t get progress because we’re wise; we get it because we’re stubborn, deluded, and willing to exhaust ourselves pursuing shiny fantasies.

The specific intent is a backhanded defense of misdirected striving. Schopenhauer’s philosophy treats the will as a blind, restless force that drives us into perpetual dissatisfaction. Here, that engine doesn’t produce happiness or “fulfillment”; it produces byproducts. The subtext is cutting: our loftiest pursuits are often just gilded cravings, but the world can still be improved as collateral damage.

Context matters. By Schopenhauer’s lifetime, alchemy was already a cautionary emblem: premodern mysticism transmuted into Enlightenment method. He’s writing in a Europe intoxicated by science and industry, and he refuses the triumphalist story that reason inevitably conquers ignorance. Instead, he offers a more sardonic mechanism for history: error as an incubator. The line works because it comforts without consoling. It grants value to failure, but not as a self-help mantra; as a reminder that human aims are frequently misguided, and the best outcomes may arrive sideways, unearned, and unplanned.

Even the phrasing “greater value” lands like a philosophical feint: the real “gold” isn’t what we want, it’s what our wanting inadvertently makes possible.