Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes

16 quotes in 281 categories

• In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful…
• 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…
• We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.
• 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…
• 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…
• Each new generation asks – What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be – Why does man…
• Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.
• A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness.
• 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…
• The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end.
• Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.
• If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains peace of mind.
• As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change.
• 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…
• Why does man need a meaning to life?”
• For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet.

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