Olaf Stapledon Quotes

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

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.

A nation . . . is just a society for hating foreigners.

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?

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

In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.

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.

Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.

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.

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.

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.

That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.

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

In a sick world even the hale are sick.

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

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.

Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.

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

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.

That strange blend of the commercial traveller the missionary and the barbarian conqueror which was the American abroad.

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.

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.

Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.

I am the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God.

My soul, sir? I haven't got one. The management doesn't allow them.

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.