For at every step, in great things as in small, we must experience that the world and life are by no means arranged with a view to containing a happy existence.
 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819). copy citation

add
Author Arthur Schopenhauer
Source The World as Will and Representation
Topic existence experience
Date 1819
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40868/40868-h/40868-h.html

Context

“We are nothing more than will to live and the successive satisfaction of all our volitions is what we think in the conception of happiness. As long as we persist in this inborn error, indeed even become rigidly fixed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world appears to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things as in small, we must experience that the world and life are by no means arranged with a view to containing a happy existence. While now by this the thoughtless man only finds himself tormented in reality, in the case of him who thinks there is added to his real pain the theoretical perplexity why a world and a life which exist in order that one may be happy in them answer their end so badly.” source