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So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.

Olaf Stapledon

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Olaf Stapledon
Age: 64 †
Born: 1886
Born: May 10
Died: 1950
Died: September 6
Paramedic
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Rocks
Ancestor
Learned
Naive
Look
Repeat
Might
Repeats
Looks
Pool
Lowly
Drama
Zest
Rock
Dramas
Creatures
Ancestors

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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.
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In a sick world even the hale are sick.
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No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb [Earth] teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
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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.
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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.
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Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.
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My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.
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In that instant when I had seen... 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.
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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?
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That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
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It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit... We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
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A nation . . . is just a society for hating foreigners.
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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.
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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... themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
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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.
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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.
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In you, humanity is precarious and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
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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.
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