35+ Olaf Stapledon Quotes On Art, Education And First Man

Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and writer of science fiction. He was known for his pioneering works of speculative fiction that explored the possibilities of the future and of alternate worlds. His most famous works include Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). Following is our collection on famous quotes by Olaf Stapledon on love, art, education.

Top 10 Olaf Stapledon Quotes

1. The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.
2. In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
3. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb [Earth] teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
4. 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.
5. That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
6. 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.
7. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.
8. 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?
9. 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.
10. Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.

Olaf Stapledon Short Quotes

• A nation . . . is just a society for hating foreigners.
• Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!
• Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.
• In a sick world even the hale are sick.

Olaf Stapledon Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart's pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity's flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth. — Olaf Stapledon

Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets. — 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

I see, indeed I know, that in some sense God is love, and God is wisdom, and God is creative action, yes and God is beauty; but what God actually is, whether the maker of all things, or the fragrance of all things, or just a dream in our own hearts, I have not the art to know. Neither have you, I believe; nor any man, nor any spirit of our humble stature. — Olaf Stapledon

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single point of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time. — Olaf Stapledon

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

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

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

It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation. Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet interest, my own decline and fall. — Olaf Stapledon

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

I spent on the Other Earth many "other years," wandering from mind to mind and country to country, but I did not gain any clear understanding of the psychology of the Other Men and the significance of their history till I encountered one of their philosophers, an aging but still vigorous man whose eccentric and unpalatable views had prevented him from attaining eminence. — Olaf Stapledon

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

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. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster. — Olaf Stapledon

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

[S]ervants of darkness had no lasting joy in their service. In all of them the will for darkness was a perversion of the will for the light. In all but a few maniacs the satisfaction of the will for darkness was at all times countered by a revulsion which the unhappy spirit either dared not confess even to itself, or else rejected as cowardly and evil. — Olaf Stapledon

Life Lessons by Olaf Stapledon

1. Olaf Stapledon's work emphasizes the importance of looking beyond our own limited perspectives and considering the wider implications of our actions.
2. He encourages us to strive for a more holistic understanding of our place in the universe, and to take responsibility for our collective future.
3. His work also emphasizes the importance of empathy, and of recognizing the interconnectedness of all life.