Quotes from Olaf Stapledon

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.

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.

lives were spent in pursuit of shadowy ends that remained ever just round the corner.

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.

The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed ti 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. Imperceptibly the young were led to discover for themselves this goal.

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

The music of the spheres is unlike other music not only in respect of its richness, but also in the nature of its medium. It is a music not merely of sounds but of souls.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." ? Albert Camus

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

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

En un cosmos inconcebiblemente complejo, cada vez que una criatura se enfrentaba con diversas alternativas, no elegía una sino todas, creando de este modo muchas historias universales del cosmos. Ya que en ese mundo había muchas criaturas y que cada una de ellas estaba continuamente ante muchas alternativas, las combinaciones de esos procesos eran innumerables, y a cada instante ese universo se ramificaba infinitamente en otros universos, y éstos, en otros a su vez.

Yet most of these worlds were really no worse than our own. Like us, they had reached that stage when the spirit, half awakened from brutishness and very far from maturity, can suffer most desperately and behave most cruelly.

For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source.

Aunque las potencias nos destruyan —dijo—, ¿quiénes somos para condenarlas? Sería lo mismo que una palabra juzgara al hombre que la ha pronunciado.