Share a quote from Nietzsche, and what it means to you.
While I agree Nietzsche's association with the edgelord/TK brand of nihilism is superficial at best, it's unfair to pin the same on Schopenhauer. He was an humourist, an advocate of l'art pour l'art, a vegetarian before it was cool, a patron of love and life's simple pleasures, to such a degree that Nietzsche himself questioned Schopenhauer's wearing of the word pessimism.
"Everything sucks." —Niche
This is charged with a lot of meaning to me. It means that everything we do means nothing to the Universe.
But I don't agree with Niche. I believe this world has so much to give us. I refuse to believe this Universe is nothing but futility and perpetual boredom.
It was not so much that Schopenhauer himself was a nihilist, more that one who took him seriously would find a pessimistic attitude toward the condition of life coupled with an attack on theism—a recipe for nihilism. Nietzsche's life-affirming values were very much a reaction to the words of Schopenhauer.
"In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: 'It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all.'
If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.
If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much—and then performed so little. This feeling will so completely predominate over every other that they will not even consider it necessary to give it words; but on either side it will be silently assumed, and form the ground-work of all they have to talk about.
He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
While no man is much to be envied for his lot, there are countless numbers whose fate is to be deplored.
Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood."