“ We sometimes see a man so deeply moved by a great injury which he has experienced, or, it may be, only witnessed, that he deliberately and irretrievably stakes his own life in order to take vengeance on the perpetrator of that wrong. ”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819). copy citation
| Author | Arthur Schopenhauer |
|---|---|
| Source | The World as Will and Representation |
| Topic | experience life |
| Date | 1819 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-h/38427-h.html |
Context
“A much more striking, but also a much rarer, characteristic of human nature, which expresses that desire to draw eternal justice into the province of experience, i.e., of individuality, and at the same time indicates a felt consciousness that, as I have expressed it above, the will to live conducts at its own cost the great tragedy and comedy, and that the same one will lives in all manifestations,—such a characteristic, I say, is the following. We sometimes see a man so deeply moved by a great injury which he has experienced, or, it may be, only witnessed, that he deliberately and irretrievably stakes his own life in order to take vengeance on the perpetrator of that wrong. We see him seek for some mighty oppressor through long years, murder him at last, and then himself die on the [pg 463] scaffold, as he had foreseen, and often, it may be, did not seek to avoid, for his life had value for him only as a means of vengeance.”
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