“Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 1, “The Appearance of a New Species” (p. 102)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not…" by Olaf Stapledon?
Olaf Stapledon photo
Olaf Stapledon 113
British novelist and philosopher 1886–1950

Related quotes

Werner Kunz photo
Walker Percy photo
Richard Rodríguez photo

“Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: It is one thing to know your author-man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.
How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew — only that — a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as "Judaica." There is no shelf for irony.

Malcolm Gladwell photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“I had zero experience at the time, but I wanted to create something that no-one else was doing. It was that absence of anything like Mafia that really motivated me. I was really proud to finish it and even more proud that the final product was almost identical to the original vision.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

10 Years On: Interview With Mafia Director Daniel Vavra http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mafia-director-daniel-vavra-gta-grand-theft-409859 (November 29, 2012)

Marianne Williamson photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Julian Huxley photo

“We shall start from new premises. … The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

Transhumanism (1957)
Context: We shall start from new premises. … The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.
"I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.

“One person ought to treat another person properly, even if the person's himself."
"What a strange idea!”

Mordion said.
Source: Hexwood (1993), pp. 181-182.

Related topics