Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Olaf Stapledon
Olaf Stapledon Quotes
107 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Militarists also were strongly opposed to the new invention; for in the cheap and efficient production of illusory sexual embraces they saw a danger even more serious than contraception. The supply of cannon-fodder would decline.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Religion finally severed the unity which all willed but none could trust. An heroic nation of monotheists sought to impose its faith on a vaguely pantheist world. For the first and last time the Second Men stumbled into a world-wide civil war; and just because the war was religious it developed a brutality hitherto unknown.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
The Seventh Men were completely without interest in the universal and the unseen. The beauty which they sought to create was ephemeral and very largely sensuous. And they were well content that it should be so. Personal immortality, said a dying sage, would be as tedious as an endless song.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Thus, little by little, it came about, as so often before, that the Star Maker outgrew his creature. Increasingly he frowned upon the loveliness that he still cherished. Then, seemingly with a conflict of reverence and impatience, he set our cosmos in its place among his other works.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
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 with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Broadly there are two very different spheres of our unconscious nature. The one is primitive and largely sub-human. It consists of all our bodily needs and our so-called instinctive cravings. It is all that we have in common with the beasts together with all that we share with the lowliest of our own human kind. But in addition to this there are seemingly unconscious factors in our nature which, far from being sub—human, constitute the drive of our nature toward experiences and activities of a kind more developed and more lucid than our extant ordinary conscious nature.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects: as the spirit's particular creative mood that had given rise to me, the cosmos; and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit.
Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
As I contemplated the host of deities that rose to me like a smoke cloud from the many worlds, a new image, a new symbol of the infinite spirit, took shape in my mind. Though born of my own cosmical imagination, it was begotten by a greater than I.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
I had now to select that mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
At first it had been youth's ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Under the pressure of a war to the death, all that was best, all that was most human and gentle on each side was crushed out by military necessity. On the one side, the passion for a unified world, where every individual should live a free and full life in service of the world community, was overcome by the passion to punish spies, traitors, and heretics. On the other, vague and sadly misguided yearnings for a nobler, less materialistic life were cleverly transformed by the reactionary leaders into vindictiveness against the revolutionaries.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
In time, of course, Paul's day world ceased to be flat, and became a huge ball. At this stage the universe was more like a dumpling than a sandwich. Vaguely Paul still conceived the three levels of existence. The nether night was deep down within the ball of the day world. The starry night was all around it. On the ball were all the countries except Fairyland, which was nowhere.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, ineffective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another.
Olaf Stapledon
Source
Report...
In that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was 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
1
2
3
4
5
Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Olaf Stapledon
Wikipedia
Born:
May 10, 1886
Died:
September 6, 1950
(aged 64)
Bio:
William Olaf Stapledon known as Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of influential works of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Known for:
Star Maker (1937)
Odd John (1935)
Sirius (1944)
Last Men in London (1932)
Most used words:
spirit
cosmos
human
time
universe
life
man
love
god
creature
race
mind
worlds
power
strange
Olaf Stapledon on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Olaf Stapledon Quotes
Olaf Stapledon Short Quotes
British Philosopher Quotes
Philosopher Quotes
19th-century Philosopher Quotes
Related People
H. G. Wells
English Historian
Arthur C. Clarke
British Explorer
Brian Aldiss
British Author
Stanisław Lem
Polish Author
Gregory Benford
American Physicist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes