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Olaf Stapledon: 226 quotes2 likes

“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 book Star Maker

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

“I began to lose heart. The appalling desert of darkness and barren fire, the huge emptiness so sparsely pricked with scintillations, the colossal futility of the whole universe, hideously oppressed me.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter II: Interstellar Travel (p. 20)

“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 book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter X: A Vision of the Galaxy (p. 129)

“In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combination of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Anticipating the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by 20 years.
Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 180)

“To speak thus of the universal spirit is almost childishly anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all, must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 177)

“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 book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 166)

“Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

“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 book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XIII: Humanity on Venus; Section 2, “The Flying Men” (p. 199)

“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 book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 3, “Europe After the Anglo-French War” (p. 26)

“If ever they are put to the test, they shy away, affirming that nationalism is 'practical', cosmopolitanism but a remote ideal. Though they see it intellectually, their hearts are not capable of responding to it. If ever the nation is in danger, their cosmopolitanism evaporates, and they stand for the nation in the good old style. Yet intellectually they know that in their modem world this way leads to disaster.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter V: Origins of the European war

“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 book Sirius

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter VI Birth-pangs of a Personality

“Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 188)

“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 book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 3, “The Zenith of the Second Men” (p. 110)

“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

Part VII, 1. Harking Back to the Tibetan Revolution
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

“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

Other texts <br class="br">Source: The Great Certainty http://web.archive.org/web/20090723055942/http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/thegreatcertainty.html

“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 book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 2. A Busy World (p. 33)

“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 book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 1. The Starting Point (p. 11)

“The great world to which I am native has long ago outgrown the myths, the toys, the bogies of your infant world. There, one lives without the fear of death and pain, though there one dies and suffers. There, one knows no lust to triumph over other men, no fear of being enslaved. There one loves without craving to possess, worships without thought of salvation, contemplates without pride of spirit. There one is free as none in your world is free, yet obedient as none of you is obedient.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter IX: On Earth and On Neptune.

“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 book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 179)