27 quotes
The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.
Star Maker (1937)
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)
Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.
Star Maker (1937)
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)
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.
Star Maker (1937)
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.
Star Maker (1937)
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy.
Star Maker (1937)
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.
Star Maker (1937)
I conceived the whole life of the cosmos not as an immensely protracted and leisurely passage from a remote and shadowy source to a glorious and a still more remote eternity, but as a brief, a headlong and forlorn, race against galloping time.
Star Maker (1937)
Only in couples and in little circles of companions could they support true community, the communion of mutual insight and respect and love. But in their tribes and nations they conceived all too easily the sham community of the pack, baying in unison of fear and hate.
Star Maker (1937)
To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
Star Maker (1937)
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.
Star Maker (1937)
He saw that their distinctive virtue lay in their finitude, their minute particularity, their tortured balance between dullness and lucidity; and that to save them from these would be to annihilate them.
Star Maker (1937)
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.
Star Maker (1937)
It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.
Star Maker (1937)
It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is,the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
Star Maker (1937)
The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the human spirit’s manifold potentialities.
Star Maker (1937)