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Olaf Stapledon

111 quotes

“Yes, we had one and all left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all, he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects: as the spirit’s particular creative mood that had given rise to me, the cosmos; and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit. Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fictitious deities of all races in all worlds once more crowded themselves upon me, symbols of majesty and tenderness, of ruthless power, of blind creativity, and of all-seeing wisdom. And though these images were but the fantasies of created minds, it seemed to me that one and all did indeed embody some true feature of the Star Maker’s impact upon the creatures.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I contemplated the host of deities that rose to me like a smoke cloud from the many worlds, a new image, a new symbol of the infinite spirit, took shape in my mind. Though born of my own cosmical imagination, it was begotten by a greater than I.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work; calmly rejoicing in his achievement, but recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws in his initial conception, and already lusting for fresh creation.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The cosmos which he now created was that which contains the readers and the writer of this book. In its making he used, but with more cunning art, many of the principles which had already served him in earlier creations; and he wove them together to form a more subtle and more capricious unity than ever before.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To speak thus of the universal spirit is almost childishly anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all, must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus, little by little, it came about, as so often before, that the Star Maker outgrew his creature. Increasingly he frowned upon the loveliness that he still cherished. Then, seemingly with a conflict of reverence and impatience, he set our cosmos in its place among his other works.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combination of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Still peering eastward from my hill, I saw the Pacific, strewn with islands; and then the Americas, where the descendants of Europe long ago mastered the descendants of Asia, through priority in the use of guns, and the arrogance that guns breed.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great struggle of our age was brewing. One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more sinister? Was it the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive, passion of the tribe.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some claim that telepathy and clairvoyance and pre-vision of the future are high-level powers characteristic of the upper reaches. I am not in a position to judge whether such powers exist or not, though on the whole I incline with much hesitation to believe that in some form or other they do. But I cannot see anything particularly lofty about them. They may be consequences of high development, but in themselves they are merely strange modes of perceiving events of commonplace order.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the one side was the sluggish reptilian will for ease and sleep and death, rising sometimes to active hate and destructiveness; on the other side the still blindfold and blundering will for the lucid and coherent spirit.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]ervants of darkness had no lasting joy in their service. In all of them the will for darkness was a perversion of the will for the light. In all but a few maniacs the satisfaction of the will for darkness was at all times countered by a revulsion which the unhappy spirit either dared not confess even to itself, or else rejected as cowardly and evil.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he individual in whom the will for the light is strong and clear finds his heart inextricably bound up with the struggle of the forces of light in his native place and time. Much as he may long for the opportunity of fuller self- expression in a happier world, he knows that for him self-expression is impossible save in the world in which his mind is rooted. The individual in whom the will for the light is weak soon persuades himself that his opportunity lies elsewhere.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The aim was to provide that in boring occupations hours should be short, and in interesting work long. Exceptionally, some monotonous work involved rather long hours, but in such cases the workers were chosen from the psychological class who thrive best on monotonous occupations in which they can day-dream.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She said, "We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. We are so terribly different." "Yes," he said, "But the more different, the more lovely the loving.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sunsets in pictures are so tiresome, but only boors and half-wits are not stirred by real sunsets.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course I don't want the old religious dope. But I don't want just the new science dope either. I want the truth.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see, indeed I know, that in some sense God is love, and God is wisdom, and God is creative action, yes and God is beauty; but what God actually is, whether the maker of all things, or the fragrance of all things, or just a dream in our own hearts, I have not the art to know. Neither have you, I believe; nor any man, nor any spirit of our humble stature.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]o far as music ever had a "meaning" beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its "meaning" must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or "the nature of existence"; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dear beautiful one, I praise the stars for the song's end. Farewell!”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is, I believe, something, which may be named by the misleading and debased word 'religion', and is the most distinctively human or awakened activity of man. But clearly there is something else, which is also called 'religion', and is his greatest folly and shame.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These three activities, then, intelligence, love and creative action, which are so closely involved in one another, I cannot but feel to be intrinsically good. In their outstanding expressions they are good in an outstanding degree. Together they form the distinctively human kind of behaviour.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Broadly there are two very different spheres of our unconscious nature. The one is primitive and largely sub-human. It consists of all our bodily needs and our so-called instinctive cravings. It is all that we have in common with the beasts together with all that we share with the lowliest of our own human kind. But in addition to this there are seemingly unconscious factors in our nature which, far from being sub--human, constitute the drive of our nature toward experiences and activities of a kind more developed and more lucid than our extant ordinary conscious nature.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Source: The Core, in: An Olaf Stapledon Reader, Syracuse University Press, New York 1997: pp. 266-272.
“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted. For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus it was that America sank further and further into Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also brilliant invention, were concentrated upon puerile ends. In particular the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the most lasting agony of this war was suffered, not by the defeated, but by the victors. For when their passion had cooled the Americans could not easily disguise from themselves that they had committed murder. They were not at heart a brutal folk, but rather a kindly. They liked to think of the world as a place of innocent pleasure-seeking, and of themselves as the main purveyors of delight. Yet they had been somehow drawn into this fantastic crime; and henceforth an all-pervading sense of collective guilt warped the American mind. They had ever been vainglorious and intolerant; but now these qualities in them became extravagant even to insanity. Both as individuals and collectively, they became increasingly frightened of criticism, increasingly prone to blame and hate, increasingly self-righteous, increasingly hostile to the critical intelligence, increasingly superstitious.”
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source