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

—  Peter Wessel Zapffe

Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 20, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Death is a terrible provocation. It appears almost everywhere, presenting a stern but effective scale for both values a…" by Peter Wessel Zapffe?
Peter Wessel Zapffe photo
Peter Wessel Zapffe 15
Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and author 1899–1990

Related quotes

“We humanitarians, as our name suggests, believe that man has an ethical duty to man. We believe that the value of any system is measured by the consideration given to all human beings, not just to a favored class: and by that standard, our present system is a miserable failure.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 10 (p. 120)

Thorstein Veblen photo

“A standard of living is of the nature of habit. …it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once become habitual.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 106

Benjamin N. Cardozo photo

“A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. … Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

p, 125
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

Mark Manson photo

“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 9, “...And Then You Die” (p. 206)

“Economics and ethics naturally come into rather intimate relations with each other since both recognizedly deal with the problem of value.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: The Ethics of Competition, 1935, p. 11

Leonard Susskind photo

“The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed.”

Leonard Susskind (1940) American physicist

[1984, The gauge hierarchy problem, technicolor, supersymmetry, and all that, Physics Reports, 104, 2–4, 181–193, 10.1016/0370-1573(84)90208-4]

Holden Karnofsky photo

“I generally believe in trying to be an ethical person by a wide variety of different ethical standards”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

In "Staff members' personal donations for giving season 2016" https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/09/staff-members-personal-donations-giving-season-2016/, December 2016
Context: Regarding (b) ["checking boxes I want to check for considering myself a personally moral/ethical person, which is related but not identical to trying for maximum expected positive impact on the world"]: every year, I want to give a significant amount to "charity" as conventionally construed, straightforwardly helping the less fortunate. I generally believe in trying to be an ethical person by a wide variety of different ethical standards (not all of which are consequentialist). And I wouldn't feel that I were meeting this standard if I were giving nothing (or a trivial amount) to known, outstanding opportunities to help the less fortunate, for purposes of saving as much money as possible for adversarial projects (such as political campaigns) and/or more speculative projects (such as work related to artificial intelligence). I think the best giving opportunities in this category are GiveWell's top charities, so I will be giving a portion of this year's donation there, following the recommended allocation.

Franz Boas photo

“Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways”

Franz Boas (1858–1942) German-American anthropologist

Boas (1928) in foreword to Margaret Mead (1928) Coming of Age in Samoa.

“We now move to what they ought to do — from the viewpoint of various leaders and segments of society and their own standards of right and wrong. Ethics, like preference, may be considered a product of values.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 88 (in 1980 edition)

“REGIME VALUES. An expression used frequently in public administration literature to denote the fundamental principles of a polity which, ordinarily, should guide administrative behavior. Although the term applies in principle to any polity, de facto it appears almost exclusively in literature focused on the United States. The expression entered the public administration literature in the first edition of this author’s Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

John Rohr (1998), "Regime values." In J. M. Shafritz (ed.), International encyclopedia of public policy and administration. Westview Press. p. 1929

Related topics