The Last Messiah Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“a certain species of deer once walked the earth but was rendered extinct by a set of antlers that had become far too large. Mutations, after all, are blind, thrown into life without a thought to their viability in the environment. When one is depressed and anxious, the human mind is like such antlers, which in all their magnificent glory, crush their bearer slowly to the ground..”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation’s hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic. Such a ’feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“And man took up his bow, fruit of the union between the soul and the hand, and went out under the stars. But when the animals came to their waterhole, where he out of habit waited for them, he no longer knew the spring of the tiger in his blood, but a great psalm to the brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives. That day he came home with empty hands, and when they found him again by the rising of the new moon, he sat dead by the waterhole.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“The terror of existence stares us in the face, and we realize with a staggering gasp that our minds hang suspended by a web of their own making, and that the abyss of hell gapes below.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“And man took up his bow, fruit of the union between the soul and the hand, and went out
under the stars. But when the animals came to their waterhole, where he out of habit waited for them, he no longer knew the spring of the tiger in his blood, but a great psalm to the brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives.

That day he came home with empty hands, and when they found him again by the rising of the new moon, he sat dead by the waterhole.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“The human mind is like such antlers, which in all their magnificent glory, crush their bearer slowly to the ground.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah