Essays Quotes

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“– 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

“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

“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

“Therefore, the eyes of mankind also seek his distant, vanished tomb, where the very deadly cold preserves his form. Until finally, long - it breaks loose thunderously and sails with the storm out towards the deep, dark blue sea in one huge, sun-sparkling sarcophagus.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“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

“The new slogans, in continuation of German tradition, give the conscience peace for a time while the nerves are strengthened. That the cosmic consciousness will awaken again, when the group's existence is assured, lies beyond doubt. Faust is not dead, he is just sleeping.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“Naar et menneske tar sit liv i depression, er det en naturlig død av sjælelig aarsak. Det moderne barbari med at "redde" selvmordere hviler paa en haarreisende misforstaaelse av tilværelsens vesen.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“Thunder belches around him, but it does not affect him, nothing affects him, as he sits enthroned in his Olympic indifference over the hectic course of life—an anvil for the gods to hammer on.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“Now it understood that everything was lost and that the dream was dead too resistant. And when the dream was dead, the wick was not even weeks longer, but a fairly common thread.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“En natt i lengst forsvundne tider våknet mennesket og så seg selv... da dyrene kom til sine vannhull, hvor han ventet dem av gammel vane, da kjente han ikke lenger tigerspranget i sitt blod, men en stor salme om lidelsens broderskap mellom alt som lever.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays