Top 80 Olaf Stapledon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In a sick world even the hale are sick.”

— Olaf Stapledon

2. “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

3. “We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colors that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.”

— Olaf Stapledon

4. “Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.”

— Olaf Stapledon

5. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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

— Olaf Stapledon

7. “Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.”

— Olaf Stapledon

8. “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!”

— Olaf Stapledon

9. “Men with sound eyes need not concern themselves with the arguments of blind men to prove that seeing cannot occur.”

— Olaf Stapledon

10. “We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.”

— Olaf Stapledon

11. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

12. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

13. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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

— Olaf Stapledon

15. “Animals that were fashioned for hunting and fighting in the wild were suddenly called upon to be citizens, and moreover citizens of a world-community.”

— Olaf Stapledon

16. “For in a declining civilization it is often the old who see furthest and see with youngest eyes.”

— Olaf Stapledon

17. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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

— Olaf Stapledon

19. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

20. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

21. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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

— Olaf Stapledon

23. “Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets.”

— Olaf Stapledon

24. “Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.”

— Olaf Stapledon

25. “Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.”

— Olaf Stapledon

26. “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

27. “Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.”

— Olaf Stapledon

28. “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

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

— Olaf Stapledon

30. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

31. “Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!”

— Olaf Stapledon

32. “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

33. “Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly herd it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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

— Olaf Stapledon

35. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

36. “No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.”

— Olaf Stapledon

37. “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

38. “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

39. “If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man’s blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!”

— Olaf Stapledon

40. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

41. “I was a disembodied, wandering view-point.”

— Olaf Stapledon

42. “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

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

— Olaf Stapledon

44. “We of today must conceive our relation to the rest of the universe as best we can; and even if our images must seem fantastic to future men, they may none the less serve their purpose today.”

— Olaf Stapledon

45. “Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.”

— Olaf Stapledon

46. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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

— Olaf Stapledon

48. “Science now held a position of unique honour among the First Men. This was not so much because it was in this field that the race long ago during its high noon had thought most rigorously, nor because it was through science that men had gained some insight into the nature of the physical world, but rather because the application of scientific principles had revolutionized their material circumstances.”

— Olaf Stapledon

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Olaf Stapledon