Olaf Stapledon - Collected Quotes

"Great are the stars, and man is of no account of them." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. 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." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"Presently nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of dust that once were galaxies." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"This is the goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"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. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"In such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?" (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"In that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendour, 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, "Star Maker", 1937)

"In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"It was in this world that we found in its most striking form a social disease which is perhaps the commonest of all world-diseases—namely, the splitting of the  population into two mutually unintelligible castes through the influence of economic forces." (Olaf Stapledon, "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." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light." (Olaf Stapledon, "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." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"The universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must ofcourse be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spiritgrew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a wholeworld of sensitive spirits should fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horrorit seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker." (Olaf Stapledon, "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." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"Is it credible that our world should have two futures? I have seen them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, one bright; one the defeat of all man’s hopes, the betrayal of all his ideals, the other their hardwon triumph." (Olaf Stapledon, "Darkness and the Light", 1942)

"I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it." (Olaf Stapledon, "Nebula Maker", 1976)