Peter Wessel Zapffe > Quotes

“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, Essays og Epistler

“Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

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

“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, Essays

“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

“The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“Each new generation asks – What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be – Why does man need a meaning to life?”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“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, Essays

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

“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, Essays

“He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it preformed a miracle with man, but later did not know him”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“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. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.

– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?

– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.

– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“A man will come forth, who before all other men has dared to strip his soul naked and give himself wholly over to our most profound questioning, even to the idea of annihilation. A man who has grasped life in its cosmic context, and whose agony is the agony of the world. But such a rising wail will assail him from all the people of the earth, crying for his thousandfold execution, when his voice blankets the world like a shroud, and his peculiar message is heard for the first and last time:
The life on many worlds is like a rushing river, but the life on this world is like a stagnant puddle and a backwater.The mark of annihilation is written on thy brow. How long will ye mill about on the edge? But there is one victory and one crown, and one salvation and one answer: Know thyselves; be unfruitful and let there be peace on Earth after thy passing.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“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, Essays

“One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“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, Essays

“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

“Så kastet jeg mig over Turistforeningens Årbøker og slukte hvad jeg fandt om klatring. Horunger, nåler og Djævleskar! Store Gud!”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Barske glæder og andre temaer fra et liv under åpen himmel

“Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?

Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“Every social unit is a large, rounded attachment system, built on the solid beams of basic cultural ways of thinking. The common man manages with these shared cultural beams, his personality almost builds itself. Our personality has stopped developing, and rests on inherited cultural foundations: God, the church, the state, morality, destiny, the laws of life, the future.
The closer a norm lies to the bearing beams, the more dangerous it is to disturb it. As a rule, those close-lying norms are protected by laws and threats of punishment—the Inquisition, censorship, conservative attitudes, and so forth.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“if a desert island is no tragedy, why is a deserted planet?”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“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

“Det er tre ting en mand vil ha for sig selv, og det tredie er soveposen.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Barske glæder og andre temaer fra et liv under åpen himmel

“Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being…

So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“But the god himself in the book of Job, does he concern us? Is it all but a poetic play with a strange and too old-fashioned conception of God? Do we know this god? Well, we know him from the history of religion, he is the god of the old testament, the army of the armies, or as we would say, the army god, the jealous Yahweh. But does he only live in the history of religion? No, he also reigns in our experience, today as before 2400 years ago. He represents a well-known biological and social environment: the blind forces of nature that are without contact with man's drive towards order and meaning, of disease and the erratic impact of death, the fleetingness of fame, betrayal of friends and relatives. He is the machine and the god of power, domination of violence, party slavery and conquest alike, the god of copper pipes and armor plates. There are more than Job, who meets him with the weapon of the spirit. Some of them being trampled into heroic martyrdom; others also see the limitation of marty reed, they bend inwardly, but hide for the doubt in their heart.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays