Olaf Stapledon: Trending quotes

“It seemed that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work; calmly rejoicing in his achievement, but recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws in his initial conception, and already lusting for fresh creation.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

“[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.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

“The aim was to provide that in boring occupations hours should be short, and in interesting work long. Exceptionally, some monotonous work involved rather long hours, but in such cases the workers were chosen from the psychological class who thrive best on monotonous occupations in which they can day-dream.”

Part V The Reign of Darkness, 2. A Synthetic War
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

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

Part VIII Precarious Advance, 3. Progress.
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter I: The World of the Last Men.

“Moral judgments may conflict with one another. Two conflicting moral judgments cannot both be right. This does not mean that the moral intuition itself is subject to error, but merely that we may fail to disentangle the intuition itself from irrelevances, or may unconsciously pretend to have an intuition when we actually have it not. The intuition itself is infallible; but we can never be sure that we have it, or that we have not confused it, or expressed it falsely in words. In the same way sense-experience is infallible, but we may unconsciously pretend to have it when we have, it not, and we may misdescribe it, and so on.”

“The great struggle of our age was brewing.
One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more sinister? Was it the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive, passion of the tribe.”

Philosophy and Living (1939)

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

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 187)

“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."”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter IV Youth (a conversation between Sirius and Plaxy).

“Still peering eastward from my hill, I saw the Pacific, strewn with islands; and then the Americas, where the descendants of Europe long ago mastered the descendants of Asia, through priority in the use of guns, and the arrogance that guns breed.”

“As conscious beings advance in mental growth, they come to recognise that this ideal must embrace not merely their own kin or neighbours, not only their tribe or nation, not only the whole race or species, but all conscious beings whatever, no matter how foreign. It is surely probable that this desire for the fulfilment of personality-in-community plays a very large part in the universe. We must remember, of course, that the particular forms which it may take in different kinds of worlds, up and down the universe, may be utterly alien to our comprehension and appreciation. Or rather, not utterly alien; since, if these arguments are correct, there is an essential underlying kinship and identity in all possible kinds of conscious being.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 187)

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

Source: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter VII: Ethics

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

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 2. Earth Among the Stars (p. 13)

“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?”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 229)

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Sirius (1944)

“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.”

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

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 2. Earth Among the Stars (p. 15)

“As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while, a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter III: America and China; Section 2, “The Conflict” (p. 50)

“Yes, we had one and all left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all, he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 18)

“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.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter VI: Intimations of the Star Maker (p. 71)