A couple of interesting facts about Schopenhauer: Schopenhauer's father had strong feelings against any kind of nationalism and he selected the name "Arthur" for his son especially because it was the same in English, German, and French. As far as his mother is concerned, well, he never got along with her; when Goethe, who was a friend of hers, told her that he thought her son was destined for great things, she objected: she had never heard there could be two geniuses in a single family 
An interesting point that Schopenhauer makes I think is that philosophy is the world itself. The force he calls "Wille zum Leben" or Will (literally will-to-life) is the forces driving man to remain alive and to reproduce, a drive intertwined with desire. This Will is the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, Will is said to be prior to being. In attempting to solve or alleviate the fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer was a rare philosopher who considered philosophy and logic less important (or less effective) than art, certain charitable practices ("loving kindness", in his terms), and certain forms of religious discipline. Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought (such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor transcend the nature of desire — i.e., Will. He proposed that humans living in the realm of objects are living in the realm of desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire. The role of desire in Schopenhauer is similar to the role of Kāma, sensual gratification, which is treated as one of the goals of life relating to the second stage of life in the Hindu tradition.
These ideas have strong parallels to the notion of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hindu/Buddhist thought, with Schopenhauer drewing attention to these similarities. His philosophy is similar to Buddhism in many ways. Buddhism teaches what it calls the Four Noble Truths:
1. There is suffering or dukkha;
2. Suffering results from desire;
3. Desires can be totally eliminated (the eventual state of Nirvana)
4. Following the Eightfold Path leads to Nirvana.
Schopenhauer's philosophy asserts the first three of Buddhism's four truths in that it associates will with desire, appetite, and craving. However, instead of the fourth truth, Schopenhauer describes a twofold path. Denial of the will is attained by either:
1. Personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or
2. Knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people.
Buddhist Nirvana is equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Occult historian Joscelyn Godwin has said that it was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov, "to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters"