"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end."

Peter Wessel Zapffe Philosophy See all quotes by Peter Wessel Zapffe →

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“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.”

“I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness.”

“If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains "peace of mind.”

“Death is the most certain and the most uncertain event there is.”

“The View from Mount Zapffe" by Gisle R. Tangenes, in Philosophy Now, Issue 45:”

“Death is a terrible provocation. It appears almost everywhere, presenting a stern but effective scale for both values and ethical standards.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The intervening time to my first inauguration was filled up with wranglings between Congress and the new Executive as to the best mode of "reconstruction," or, to speak plainly, as to whether the cont…"

— Ulysses S. Grant

Politics1822–1885

#politics

"To many, this doctrine of Natural Selection, or 'the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,' seems so simple, when once clearly stated, and so consonant with known facts and received…"

— Charles Lyell

Philosophy1767–1849

#science

"An alternative “rational expectations” view denies that there is any inherent momentum in the present process of inflation. This view maintains that firms and workers have now come to expect high rate…"

— Thomas J. Sargent

Economics1943

#time

"There are many for whom the Qualification of Desirelessness is a difficult one, for they feel that they are their desires — that if their distinctive desires, their likings and dislikings, are taken a…"

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Education1895–1986

#life