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Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart’s pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth.

— Olaf Stapledon Last and First Men (1930)

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More quotes by Olaf Stapledon

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)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Olaf Stapledon (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.