Famous Quotes & Sayings

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 25 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Peter Wessel Zapffe.

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Famous Quotes By Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1369848

But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe's helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 530706

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 338006

To bear children into this world is like carrying wood to a burning house. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2194828

Why does man need a meaning to life? — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2202614

If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains peace of mind. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 288357

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1621840

Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1987231

A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1292793

He is the universe's helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1332979

Jesus must have been a psychopath — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2165440

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1452647

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2169865

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2133668

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2127955

For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 2077523

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1689450

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 351852

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1385398

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1233676

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

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 1222976

The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 953831

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature's deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 850717

No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 632498

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes 568994

As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. — Peter Wessel Zapffe