Olaf Stapledon Short Quotes

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Great are the stars, and man is of no account of them.

Olaf Stapledon
Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.

Olaf Stapledon
Nations appeared, and all the phobias that make up nationalism.

Olaf Stapledon
Dear beautiful one, I praise the stars for the song's end. Farewell!

Olaf Stapledon
Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!

Olaf Stapledon
Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat.

Olaf Stapledon
Sunsets in pictures are so tiresome, but only boors and half-wits are not stirred by real sunsets.

Olaf Stapledon
The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

Olaf Stapledon
Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself.

Olaf Stapledon
The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.

Olaf Stapledon
I can only point out that, the higher a mind's development, the more it discovers in the universe to occupy it.

Olaf Stapledon
Presently nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of dust that once were galaxies.

Olaf Stapledon
The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.

Olaf Stapledon
Of course I don't want the old religious dope. But I don't want just the new science dope either. I want the truth.

Olaf Stapledon
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
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
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
Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism.

Olaf Stapledon
So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors eons ago.

Olaf Stapledon
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
I, at any rate, acknowledge only one master, not forty-five million two-legged sheep, or two thousand million, but simply and absolutely the spirit.

Olaf Stapledon
Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.

Olaf Stapledon
Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again.

Olaf Stapledon
In some minds the defence of the human spirit was sincerely identified with the defence of a particular nation, conceived as the home of all enlightenment.

Olaf Stapledon
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
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
She said, "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
Contraception had produced not only a decline of population but also a tendency of the more intelligent strains in the population to breed less than the dullards and half-wits.

Olaf Stapledon
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
When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being.

Olaf Stapledon