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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.

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
Movement
Tibetan
Stand
Ridicule
Faith
Frustration
Cannot
Governments
Government
Bright
Disconcerted
Mood
Sham
Confidence
Missionaries
Laughing
Imperial

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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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That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
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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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Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.
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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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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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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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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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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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So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
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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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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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