“If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains "peace of mind."”
Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)
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Peter Wessel Zapffe 15
Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and author 1899–1990Related quotes
“Therefore death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.”
Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.
Book III, lines 830–831 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
“A person is a process, one that leads to death…”
“An Unread Book”, p. 40
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14
Archimedes or the Future of Physics (1927)
Context: The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it.
“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Women Saints of East and West