Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer

“Now if, having taken stock of human wickedness as we have just done, you feel a sense of horror at it, you should straight-away turn your eyes to the misery of human existence. (And if you are shocked at its misery you should turn your eyes to its wickedness.) Then you will see that they balance one another; you will become aware of the existence of an eternal justice, that the world itself is its own universal Last Judgment, and you will begin to understand why everything that lives must atone for its existence, first by living and then by dying.”

-Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851