Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes

#1. If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains peace of mind.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#2. The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#3. Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#4. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#5. Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#6. The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#7. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#8. To bear children into this world is like carrying wood to a burning house.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#9. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#10. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#11. When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#12. No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#13. He is the universe's helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#14. We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#15. For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#16. The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn't seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#17. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#18. Why does man need a meaning to life?

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#19. Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#20. Jesus must have been a psychopath

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#21. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#22. Man is the ultimate tragic being, because he has learned enough about the Earth to realise the Earth would be better off without the presence of humankind.

Peter Wessel Zapffe