Top 63 Olaf Stapledon Quotes
#1. Had God,then,peopled the whole universe with our kind?Did he perhaps in very truth make us in his image?It was incredible.To ask such questions proved that I had lost mental balance.
Olaf Stapledon
#2. The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful.
Olaf Stapledon
#3. It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.
Olaf Stapledon
#4. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.
Olaf Stapledon
#5. They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled, bitter, unwittingly vindictive.
Olaf Stapledon
#6. The Tibetan missionaries in their mood of bright confidence disconcerted the imperial governments by laughing the new movement into frustration. For a sham faith cannot stand ridicule.
Olaf Stapledon
#7. A nation ... is just a society for hating foreigners.
Olaf Stapledon
#8. The creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself.
Olaf Stapledon
#9. Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me.
Olaf Stapledon
#10. So great was the mass of information forced upon the student, that he had no time to think of the mutual implications of the various branches of his knowledge.
Olaf Stapledon
#11. The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the human spirit's manifold potentialities.
Olaf Stapledon
#12. I am the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God.
Olaf Stapledon
#13. In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.
Olaf Stapledon
#14. Animals that were fashioned for hunting and fighting in the wild were suddenly called upon to be citizens, and moreover citizens of a world-community.
Olaf Stapledon
#15. Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!
Olaf Stapledon
#17. For in a declining civilization it is often the old who see furthest and see with youngest eyes.
Olaf Stapledon
#18. We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colors that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.
Olaf Stapledon
#19. In that instant when I had seen ... the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos ...
Olaf Stapledon
#20. He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, and after Elizabeth's taunt he cocked up a hind leg and carefully, ostentatiously, groomed his private parts, a habit which he often used with great effect to annoy his women folk.
Olaf Stapledon
#21. Why did you make only one of me? It's going to be lonely being me.
Olaf Stapledon
#22. Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.
Olaf Stapledon
#23. In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.
Olaf Stapledon
#24. My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.
Olaf Stapledon
#25. We of today must conceive our relation to the rest of the universe as best we can; and even if our images must seem fantastic to future men, they may none the less serve their purpose today.
Olaf Stapledon
#26. We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. we are so terribly different.'Yes,' he said, 'But the more different, the more lovely the loving.
Olaf Stapledon
#27. Humanity also suffered; though, save in the regions near the seat of war, it was in general only the children and the old people who suffered greatly.
Olaf Stapledon
#28. We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
Olaf Stapledon
#30. Prick the bubble of thought at any point," it was said, "and you shatter the whole of it. And since thought is one of the necessities of human life, it must be preserved." Natural
Olaf Stapledon
#31. If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man's blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!
Olaf Stapledon
#32. The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.
Olaf Stapledon
#33. The Chinese, taking off his air-helmet, uncoiled his pigtail with a certain emphasis, stripped off his heavy coverings, and revealed a sky-blue silk pyjama suit, embroidered with golden dragons.
Olaf Stapledon
#34. In fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids.
Olaf Stapledon
#35. It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit ... We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
Olaf Stapledon
#36. That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
Olaf Stapledon
#37. So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors aeons ago.
Olaf Stapledon
#38. Bvalltu, for such approximately was the philosopher's name, the "11" being pronounced more or less as in 27 Welsh, Bvalltu effected a "cure" by merely inviting
Olaf Stapledon
#39. Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners.
Olaf Stapledon
#40. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.
Olaf Stapledon
#41. To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident ... themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
Olaf Stapledon
#42. I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin.
Olaf Stapledon
#43. In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
Olaf Stapledon
#44. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire.
Olaf Stapledon
#45. But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
#46. How should the little creatures, the awakened worlds, reach out to knowledge of the whole cosmos, and of the divine? Instead they must play their own part in the drama, and appreciate their own tragic end with godlike detachment and relish.
Olaf Stapledon
#47. The true goal of human activity was the creation of a world-wide community of awakened and intelligently creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth.
Olaf Stapledon
#48. My soul, sir? I haven't got one. The management doesn't allow them.
Olaf Stapledon
#49. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Olaf Stapledon
#50. Men with sound eyes need not concern themselves with the arguments of blind men to prove that seeing cannot occur.
Olaf Stapledon
#51. With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, My looks are a rough test of people. If they don't begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they're dead inside, and dangerous.
Olaf Stapledon
#52. The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.
Olaf Stapledon
#53. How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality?
Olaf Stapledon
#54. Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.
Olaf Stapledon
#55. Philosophy is an amazing tissue of really fine thinking and incredible, puerile mistakes. It's like one of those rubber 'bones' they give dogs to chew, damned good for the mind's teeth, but as food - no bloody good at all.
Olaf Stapledon
#56. Once more I struck out into the ocean of space, heading for another near star. Once more I was disappointed.
Olaf Stapledon
#57. Distrust, not merely the old distrust of nation for nation, but a devastating distrust of human nature, gripped men like the dread of insanity.
Olaf Stapledon
#58. For the former, activity, any kind of activity, was an end in itself; for the latter, activity was but a progress toward the true end, which was rest, and peace of mind. Action was to be undertaken only when equilibrium was disturbed.
Olaf Stapledon
#59. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
Olaf Stapledon
#60. But the very success which had intoxicated them rendered them also too complacent to learn from less prosperous competitors.
Olaf Stapledon
#61. Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.
Olaf Stapledon
#62. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture.
Olaf Stapledon
#63. Wealth was the power to set things and people in motion; and in America, therefore, wealth came to be frankly regarded as the breath of God, the divine spirit immanent in man. God was the supreme Boss, the universal Employer.
Olaf Stapledon
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