The great pessimist wrote that “a healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king”, and he meant it as advice. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 to 1860) is remembered for the gloom: the world is will, a blind striving that wants and wants and is never satisfied, and our life swings between pain and boredom: order his remark on this (2 on the subject). What is remembered less is that he was also one of the most practical teachers who ever wrote. In his last years in Berlin he taught himself Spanish to translate Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, the Jesuit's pocket oracle of worldly wisdom. At sixty-three he published his own: the Parerga and Paralipomena, whose Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life he defined as “the art, namely, of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success”.

That is the promise of this page. A man who expects nothing: his note in the marginThe safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.Counsels and Maxims, ch. I of the world makes an excellent adviser on how to live in it, because he is not selling you anything. So here is one ordinary day of his in Frankfurt, where he lived his last twenty-seven years, as his English biographer, Helen Zimmern, set it down in 1876: the morning at the desk, dinner at one o'clock at the Englischer Hof, the walk, the concert, the walk home. Across the day runs the rest of his life, from Danzig to the sofa where it ended.

The card above is the bill of fare, and every dish on it is a lesson. On each plate the small capitals name the dish; the large line is the lesson in plain words; under it is his own sentence. Then there is something to play with, and under the plate, Für das Leben, for your life: one thing you could do with it today. Some words in the story carry his pencil, or an order slip for the waiter; tap them. And if he is too grim for you, here are Leibniz's spectacles. Put them on, and this is the best of all possible worlds.

He got up between seven and eight, summer and winter, took a cold sponge bath and made his own coffee. The housekeeper was forbidden to show herself: an interruption at that hour, he held, was dangerous to a brain which he compared to a freshly tuned instrument. Then he wrote.

He could afford those mornings, and he knew exactly whom to thank. He was born in Danzig on 22 February 1788, the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a rich merchant and so fierce a republican that when the Prussians took the city in 1793 he left it within twenty-four hours, though it cost him more than a tenth of his fortune. He named his son Arthur because the name is the same in every European language, which is useful to a merchant. The son was put into a merchant's office, hated it, and stayed out of respect; a few months later his father fell from an attic window of his warehouse into the canal. The fortune: order his remark on this (4 on the subject) he left bought his son a life of thinking, and the son wrote him a dedication: “this I owe to you, my father, I owe it to your activity, your wisdom, your frugality, your forethought for the future.”

So the first lesson of the day is about what a fortune is for. He divided the goods of life into three: what a man is, what a man has, and how a man stands in the estimation of others. Money: order his remark on this (4 on the subject) was the second. It mattered to him enormously, and only because it bought the first.

After his father's death his mother, Johanna, moved to Weimar and in an incredibly short time, Zimmern says, had a salon, with Goethe himself in it. She was quick, sociable and successful, a writer far more widely read than her son would be for decades. When he presented her with his first book: order his remark on this (8 on the subject), On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, she said, “Oh, I suppose that is a book for apothecaries.” He answered, “It will be read, mother, when even the lumber-room will not contain a copy of your works.”Mother, our books will sit side by side for ever, and both sell splendidly! She answered, “The whole edition of yours will still be on hand.” Both prophecies, Zimmern notes, came true. In the spring of 1814 they parted, with bitter feelings on either side.

Goethe, though, saw something. At a party in Jena some girls were laughing at a severe young doctor of philosophy who had retired alone into a window niche, and Goethe told them, “leave that youth in peace; in due time he will grow over all our heads.” What Goethe valued in him was rare: an independent thinker. The young man in the window niche was not reading: his note in the marginReading is thinking with some one else's head instead of one's own.The Art of Literature, On Thinking for Oneself. He was thinking: order his remark on this (8 on the subject), and the second lesson of the morning is why that comes first.

At midday the housekeeper put in an appearance, punctually, and any visitor knew it was time to go. He played the flute for half an hour, dressed with scrupulous care in tailcoat and white tie, and walked to the Hôtel d'Angleterre, the Englischer Hof, to dine at the one o'clock table d'hôte. He did this for the rest of his life, and never reconciled himself to the noise: his note in the marginNoise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.Studies in Pessimism, On Noise of the guests, the rattling of the plates and the servility of the waiters.

The house serves his dinner as he would have wanted it: coffee first, against the custom of the house, and with it the book of his old age. The Parerga took him six years of daily work, and then no publisher would take it. He wrote to his disciple Frauenstädt that the papers announced “that Lola Montes intends to write her memoirs, and English publishers have immediately offered her large sums. So we know what we are about.”that publishers are queuing round the block for philosophy, and quite right too. The book, which he thought he might almost call his “Philosopher for the World”, came out late in 1851. “I am right glad … to witness the birth of my last child, which completes my mission in this world.”

It is a book written by a man who was never bored, and the lesson it begins with is why.

He was not a silent diner. He was a hearty eater (the menu card has what he told a stranger who stared at his appetite) and a famous talker. When anyone intelligent sat near him he talked brilliantly; Dr. Gwinner, who became his friend and biographer, first heard him at that table, explaining the rudiments of logic to a neighbour with the face of a man speaking of love. But mostly there was nobody: his note in the marginTo be soon on friendly, or even affectionate, terms with solitude is like winning a gold mineCounsels and Maxims, ch. II, and he did not pretend there was.

That is the real point of the coin. A man who is at home in his own company can afford to bet on the conversation, and lose every day.

The soup is his best-known sentence, and he had earned it. His great book, The World as Will and Idea, came out at the end of 1818 with 1819 on the title page, and hardly anyone noticed. Sixteen years later his publisher, Brockhaus, told him that a large number of copies had been sold at waste-paper price. One of the few reviewers, Jean Paul, called it a work “full of genius, profoundness, and penetration, but with a depth often hopeless and bottomless”, which is a kind of praise.

So he knew both ends of the swing. In his twenties he had suffered every kind of want: for recognition, for his father, for a mother who would read him. In his comfortable later years he watched what happened to people who got what they wanted. He noticed that the fashionable love of travel was a revival of the nomad's instinct, with this difference: the nomad was driven by need, the tourist by ennui. The pendulum, he thought, is not a misfortune of some lives but the shape of all of them, and the useful question is only which side of it you are on today.

The fish arrives with a question about how close to sit to one's neighbours, and he had learned the answer the hard way. In 1820 he went to Berlin to lecture, and lived in lodgings. He discovered that an acquaintance of his landlady was holding coffee parties in his anteroom, the very precinct of the philosophic temple. In a fury he seized her and threw her out of the door; she fell on her right arm, sued him, won, and he paid her an allowance for more than twenty years. When at last he received her death certificate, he wrote on it a Latin pun: “Obit anus, abit onus”, the old woman dies, the burden goes.

He learned: order his remark on this (6 on the subject). In Frankfurt, when people complained that he muttered at them in the street, he made a point of lifting his hat to anyone who lifted theirs, known or unknown. “Give the world its due in bows,” he said. And when an officer proposed, since they both liked walking alone, “Well so do I. Let us walk together”, he was horrified. Too close, quills; too far, frost: he found the distance, and he wrote the best parable about it there is.

The entrée is an argument. In Berlin he gave his lectures at the university at the same hour as Hegel: his note in the marginHegel, a repulsive, mindless charlatan, an unparalleled scribbler of nonsenseThe World as Will and Idea II, ch. VI, who was then at the height of his fame and speaking to a crowded and enthusiastic hall. His own course was not completed for want of listeners. He opened it by announcing that after Kant sophists had arisen who wearied out the thinking power of their time with a great deal of noise and barbarous mysterious speech, and that an avenger would appear. It was, says Zimmern, throwing the gauntlet at Hegel's feet, and Hegel's audience did not pick it up.

He had lost to people he thought were wrong, and he set out to understand how. The result was a little handbook of thirty-eight stratagems for winning an argument whether you are right or not, which he never published; it was found among his papers after his death. It is not a manual for cheats. It is a field guide, written so that an honest person can recognise each trick as it is played on him, and it ends with the best advice in it: not to argue with the first person you meet.

With it, the wine. While he was travelling in Italy, he learned that the Danzig firm in which much of his fortune and all of his mother's was invested was going bankrupt. He hurried home, distrusted every fair promise, and saved the bulk of his own money: his note in the marginMoney is never spent to so much advantage as when you have been cheated out of it; for at one stroke you have purchased prudence.Counsels and Maxims, §43. His mother would not listen to advice, and when the crash came she and his sister Adele were left almost penniless.

So nobody can say he despised money. He respected it as a merchant's son should: he thought merchants “the only honest class of men”, because they avow openly that money-making is their object. But he respected it for what it bought, which was leisure, and he quoted with approval that “each man's leisure is worth as much as he himself is worth.” Beyond that it does something strange to the people who drink it.

The roast is served at a shooting gallery, and the question is about aim. In his last Berlin years he met Alexander von Humboldt, the most famous scientist in Germany, whom he had revered as a name, and came away disappointed: “I only found great talent where I looked for genius.”I looked for genius and found it, as one always does in Berlin! Goethe, meeting the young Schopenhauer, had said the opposite of him: “Dr. Schopenhauer has a mighty head.” Goethe drew him into his theory of colours and lent him his own optical apparatus, and the young man wrote a treatise on colour of his own. Genius, he concluded, is not a larger amount of talent: order his remark on this (3 on the subject). It is aiming at something else.

The trouble with that kind of aim is the scoring. A shot that lands where nobody else can see does not get applause; it gets news, much later, by roundabout ways, on trust.

For salad, a view of the Main from his window, and what is behind it. His rooms on the Schöne Aussicht looked across the river to Sachsenhausen. On his writing table stood a gilt statue of the Buddha next to a bust of Kant, and every night before bed he read the Oupnekhat, his version of the Upanishads, the old Vedic books. He said there was more to be learnt from one page of them than from ten volumes of the post-Kantian philosophers, called the book his Bible, and said of it: “the book has been the comfort of my life, and will also be that of my death.”

From India he took the name for the painted cloth that hangs between us and the world, the veil of Maya, and from the Vedas the three words, Tat twam asi, this thou art, which he thought were the foundation of all morality. Tear the veil and what is behind it is one restless will, the same in you as in the man across the table. That is why we can feel another's pain at all, and why, for him, compassion was not a sentiment but a perception.

Dessert is a walk along the river with the poodle. Every afternoon he walked fast for two hours, in any weather, preferably along lonely field paths, smoking a cigar he threw away half finished, and with him went a white poodle called Atma, the soul of the world. The dog became as well known as his master: children going past the house, seeing the poodle at the window, said they had seen young Schopenhauer.

There was a succession of Atmas, and he grieved each one. At the end of 1849 he wrote, “I have lost my dear, precious, large, beautiful poodle”my dear poodle has gone to live on a farm, where he chases rabbits all day: it had died of old age, not quite ten. On the walks he talked, mimicked the gait of passers-by and philosophised about everything, but the dog was teaching him something, and he wrote it down. The dog is never anxious about the future or sorry about the past, and the present is quite enough for him.

And the bill. Recognition: his note in the marginFalse fame is like a fungus, shooting up in a night and perishing as soon.The Wisdom of Life, ch. IV came at last, from England. In April 1853 the Westminster Review carried an article by John Oxenford, Iconoclasm in German Philosophy, which was translated into German and widely read, and which gave him, Zimmern says, the most unfeigned pleasure. After it, admirers crowded round him; painters painted him; Wagner sent him the poem of the Ring, inscribed with reverence and gratitude. He enjoyed it, and saw through it: “After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard, they come at the end with drums and trumpets, and think that is something.”Drums and trumpets, and right on time! The world is never late with its applause.

He had done the work first, for thirty years, while nobody read it. He ordered a stone of black Belgian granite with his name on it and nothing else: neither date nor epitaph. It is in the Frankfurt cemetery.

The officers are still on horses, women and dogs. The gold piece is still on the table. After dinner, in Frankfurt, his day went on: home, coffee, an hour's sleep, the walk, the reading room, the concert or the theatre, supper, the walk home. He thought of each day as a little life, and the rest of this one is on a second card.

Home first, and someone is knocking. Cheerfulness did not come easily to him, and he wrote about it as a man writes about a guest he has often turned away. When the cholera reached Berlin in 1831, the epidemic that killed Hegel, he fled at once: all his life he was seized by panics, of contagion, of lawsuits, of poisoned snuff, which he inherited, he thought, from his father, and fought. He chose Frankfurt for its healthy reputation, and once there sank into so dark a mood that for weeks he could not be induced to speak a word. His doctor sent him to Mannheim for a year. Early in 1833 he came back to Frankfurt, and he never left it again.

His mother had called Frankfurt “too large for a little town, too small for a large one, and on the whole a gossip's nest”. He stayed twenty-seven years, and in old age, with his fame arriving, he grew, Zimmern says, more amiable and more accessible. The man who knew gloom best was the one who knew what cheerfulness: order his remark on this (3 on the subject) is worth.

On the promenade, two young people exchange a glance. He was not above such glances himself: he was very susceptible to women, and it was, Zimmern reports, “slender brunettes whom he found dangerous”. In Weimar, at twenty-five, he lost his head over the actress Caroline Jagemann, who was short and fair, and so not even his type. He never married.

Perhaps because he had felt it so hard, he took love more seriously than any philosopher before him. Everyone else, he complained, had either left it to the poets or explained it away. He thought it was the most serious business in the world, and that the two people concerned are the last to be consulted.

In the evening, after the reading room: his note in the marginThe newspaper, is the second-hand in the clock of history; and it is not only made of baser metal than those which point to the minute and the hour, but it seldom goes right.The Art of Literature, On Some Forms of Literature and the Times, the concert. Beethoven was his favourite composer, and if a Beethoven symphony was followed by the work of anyone else, he left rather than let the pleasure: order his remark on this (5 on the subject) be spoiled. He was less kind to the music of the future: after first hearing The Flying Dutchman his verdict was “Wagner does not know what music is”Wagner knows exactly what music is, and so, happily, does everyone, though Wagner was among his most ardent disciples.

Music: order his remark on this (2 on the subject) held a special place in his philosophy. Every other art, he thought, copies the world; music speaks of the will itself, and so, for as long as it lasts, the will in us is quiet. It is the one hour of the day when the wheel stops turning.

Then the theatre, as long as he could hear it; when he grew too deaf, plays became impossible and he kept to music he already knew. The poet Chamisso had told him more than once not to paint the devil so black: “a good grey would suffice”. He never took the advice. Every seat in the house has the best view, and his was no exception; he wrote about that too, with the rare honesty of a man who knew he was one of the people he was describing.

And the walk home by night. After the theatre he supped at the hotel, cold meat and half a bottle of light wine, and if the company was good he talked far into the night. If not, he went home, lit a pipe with a stem five feet long, because the smoke cooled on its way, and read until bed.

The last evening Dr. Gwinner spent with him, in September 1860, he was sitting on the sofa, complaining of palpitations, his face showing no trace of illness or age. He talked of the news and of his fame, and he said, “It would be miserable if I should have to die now”What a perfect moment to die, or to go on living, whichever comes first!: he still had important additions to make to the Parerga. A few days later, on the morning of 21 September, he rose as usual, took his cold bath and breakfasted. A few moments after the housekeeper had aired the room and left, the doctor came in and found him dead, leaning back in a corner of the sofa. He had always hoped to die easily: “Whoever had been alone all through life must understand that solitary business better than others.”Nobody is ever alone in the best of all possible worlds, least of all at the end.

Even then the will had plans, and the mind had reasons for them. Every going to rest and sleep, he wrote, is a little death; and on the walk home there are always two of you, one strong and blind, one who can see and is sure that he is steering.