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Olaf Stapledon Quotes

1886–1950 England

William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction. His best known, and what he considered as his best work, was Star Maker (1937), which included the first known description of a Dyson sphere.

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Random Olaf Stapledon quote

59 quotes

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

Star Maker (1937)

At first it had been youth's ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry.

Last and First Men (1930)

I, at any rate, acknowledge only one master, not forty-five million two-legged sheep, or two thousand million, but simply and absolutely the spirit.

Sirius (1944)

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?

Sirius (1944)

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

Last and First Men (1930)

I can only point out that, the higher a mind’s development, the more it discovers in the universe to occupy it.

Last and First Men (1930)

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.

Star Maker (1937)

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

Last and First Men (1930)

Nations appeared, and all the phobias that make up nationalism.

Last and First Men (1930)

Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.

Star Maker (1937)

Dear beautiful one, I praise the stars for the song's end. Farewell!

Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat.

Sirius (1944)

Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again.

Last and First Men (1930)

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

Last Men in London (1932)

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

Star Maker (1937)

Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism.

Star Maker (1937)

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.

Star Maker (1937)

The precept, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” breeds in us most often the disposition to see one’s neighbor merely as a poor imitation of oneself, and to hate him if he proves different.

Star Maker (1937)

Since then two experiences have dominated me: philosophy, and the tragic disorder of our whole terrestrial hive.

Philosophy and Living (1939)

Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.

Last and First Men (1930)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Olaf Stapledon (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.