99+ Olaf Stapledon Quotes on Odd John, The Seed and the Flower and Odd John - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Olaf Stapledon quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Olaf Stapledon quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Olaf Stapledon wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Odd John, The Seed and the Flower and Odd John

My soul, sir? I haven’t got one. The management doesn’t allow them.

Industry was subordinated to the conscious social goal. Science, formerly the slave of industry, became the free colleague of wisdom.

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. We die knowing that the promise of further glory outlives us in other galaxies. We die praising the Star Maker, the Star Destroyer.

I’m afraid I’m not working out according to plan,” he said. “But if I am really a person you shouldn’t expect me to. Why did you make me without making a world for me to live in. It’s as though God had made Adam and not bothered to make Eden, nor Eve. I think it’s going to be frightfully difficult being me.

Briefly, the mentality of the plant-men in every age was an expression of the varying tension between the two sides of their nature, between the active assertive, objectively inquisitive, and morally positive animal nature and the passive subjectively contemplative and devoutly acquiescent vegetable state nature.

He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, and after Elizabeth’s taunt he cocked up a hind leg and carefully, ostentatiously, groomed his private parts, a habit which he often used with great effect to annoy his women folk.

And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.

Even thus imprisoned in an instant, the spirit of man might yet plumb the whole extent of space, and also the whole past and the whole future; and so from behind his prison bars, he might render the universe that intelligent worship which, they felt, it demanded of him. Better so, they said, than that he should fret himself with puny efforts to escape. He is dignified by his very weakness, and the cosmos by its very indifference.

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.

Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of time and space, but also the vast diversity of mind’s possible modes. But this I can only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the range of your imagination.

These races came to distinguish ever more minute periods of duration, and at the same time to extend their temporal grasp so as to apprehend ever longer periods as “now.

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.

But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it “spirit” was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it that name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, not less, than spirit, more, not less, than any possible human meaning of that word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this “more,” obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration.

Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was assured that enemies, whose flavor was of course subhuman and foul, were plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the barbarous and sadistic behavior of neighboring peoples, created in every country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable.

How should the little creatures, the awakened worlds, reach out to knowledge of the whole cosmos, and of the divine? Instead they must play their own part in the drama, and appreciate their own tragic end with godlike detachment and relish.

But to grasp my theme in its true proportions, it is necessary to do more than calculate. It is necessary to brood upon these magnitudes, to draw out the mind toward them, to feel the littleness of your here and now, and of the moment of civilization which you call history.

Philosophy is an amazing tissue of really fine thinking and incredible, puerile mistakes. It’s like one of those rubber ‘bones’ they give dogs to chew, damned good for the mind’s teeth, but as food – no bloody good at all.

I am the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God.

For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For 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. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.

Either God is the universe, or he is the flavour of creativity pervading all things.

Yet obscurely I saw that the ultimate cosmos was nevertheless lovely, and perfectly formed; and that every frustration and agony within it, however cruel to the sufferer, issued finally, without any miscarriage, in the enhanced lucidity of the cosmical spirit itself. In this sense at least no individual tragedy was in vain.

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

How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.

That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.

Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right.

It was very strange that I, who knew the whole extent of space and time, and counted the wandering stars like sheep, overlooking none, but I who was the most awakened of all beings, I, the glory which myriads in all ages had given their lives to establish, and myriads had worshipped, should now look about me with the same overpowering awe, the same abashed and tongue-tied worship as that which human travelers in the desert feel under the stars.

The true goal of human activity was the creation of a world-wide community of awakened and intelligently creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth.

In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.

In fact man’s career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids.

I loathe the urchin’s cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler’s mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man’s heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow’s flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin’s gleam of tenderness, and the urchin.

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.

Bvalltu, for such approximately was the philosopher’s name, the “11” being pronounced more or less as in 27 Welsh, Bvalltu effected a “cure” by merely inviting.

Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus.

Quotes About Writing Quotes

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.

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?

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

The story of your species is indeed a tragic story, for it closes with desolation. Your part in that story is both to strive and to fail in a unique opportunity, and so to set the current of history toward disaster. But think not therefore that your species has occurred in vain, or that your own individual lives are futile. Whatever any of you has achieved of good is an excellence in itself, and a bright thread woven into the texture of the cosmos.

Homo sapiens is a spider trying to crawl out of a basin. The higher he crawls, the steeper the hill. Sooner or later, down he goes. So long as he’s on the bottom, he can get along quite nicely, but as soon as he starts climbing, he begins to slip. And the higher he climbs the farther he falls. It doesn’t matter which direction he tries. He can make civilization after civilization, but every time, long before he begins to be really civilized, skid!

The motives of the invasion were both economic and religious. The Martians sought water and vegetable matter; but they came also in a crusading spirit, to “liberate” the terrestrial diamonds.

For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.

No influence of ours can save your species from destruction. Nothing could save it but a profound change in your own nature; and that cannot be. Wandering among you, we move always with fore-knowledge of the doom which your own imperfection imposes on you. Even if we could, we would not change it; for it is a theme required in the strange music of the spheres.

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

In a sick world even the hale are sick.

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.

Barren, barren and trivial are these words.

Star Maker Quotes

I was a disembodied, wandering view-point.

Star Maker Quotes

Humanity also suffered; though, save in the regions near the seat of war, it was in general only the children and the old people who suffered greatly.

Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future Quotes

Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire.

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