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Frasi di Olaf Stapledon
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William Olaf Stapledon è stato uno scrittore e filosofo britannico, che con le sue opere letterarie contribuì grandemente allo sviluppo del genere fantascientifico nel Novecento.

Concetti che oggi sono parte integrante della fantascienza – ingegneria genetica, terraformazione, imperi galattici, menti collettive, sfere di Dyson sono solo alcuni di questi – possono essere fatti risalire in sostanza alle sue due opere Infinito e Il costruttore di stelle, seppure possono esserci stati riferimenti passeggeri ad alcuni di essi nella fantascienza precedente.

Molte delle opere di Stapledon presentano la tensione tra le aspirazioni più nobili degli esseri intelligenti e i loro istinti animaleschi e violenti. In genere la sua narrativa espone gli avvenimenti in modo distaccato ed impersonale, dando una visione d'insieme di grande ampiezza ma dissolvendo il senso dell'individualità. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. Maggio 1886 – 6. Settembre 1950
Olaf Stapledon: 113   frasi 0   Mi piace

Olaf Stapledon: Frasi in inglese

“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.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

“I began to lose heart. The appalling desert of darkness and barren fire, the huge emptiness so sparsely pricked with scintillations, the colossal futility of the whole universe, hideously oppressed me.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter II: Interstellar Travel (p. 20)

“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.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter X: A Vision of the Galaxy (p. 129)

“In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combination of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Anticipating the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by 20 years.
Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 180)

“To speak thus of the universal spirit is almost childishly anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all, must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 177)

“In that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was 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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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 166)

“Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

“The Seventh Men were completely without interest in the universal and the unseen. The beauty which they sought to create was ephemeral and very largely sensuous. And they were well content that it should be so. Personal immortality, said a dying sage, would be as tedious as an endless song.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XIII: Humanity on Venus; Section 2, “The Flying Men” (p. 199)

“In some minds the defence of the human spirit was sincerely identified with the defence of a particular nation, conceived as the home of all enlightenment.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 3, “Europe After the Anglo-French War” (p. 26)

“If ever they are put to the test, they shy away, affirming that nationalism is 'practical', cosmopolitanism but a remote ideal. Though they see it intellectually, their hearts are not capable of responding to it. If ever the nation is in danger, their cosmopolitanism evaporates, and they stand for the nation in the good old style. Yet intellectually they know that in their modem world this way leads to disaster.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Origine: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter V: Origins of the European war

“Of course I don't want the old religious dope. But I don't want just the new science dope either. I want the truth.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Origine: Sirius (1944), Chapter VI Birth-pangs of a Personality

“Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 188)

“Religion finally severed the unity which all willed but none could trust. An heroic nation of monotheists sought to impose its faith on a vaguely pantheist world. For the first and last time the Second Men stumbled into a world-wide civil war; and just because the war was religious it developed a brutality hitherto unknown.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 3, “The Zenith of the Second Men” (p. 110)

“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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Olaf Stapledon

Part VII, 1. Harking Back to the Tibetan Revolution
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

“Broadly there are two very different spheres of our unconscious nature. The one is primitive and largely sub-human. It consists of all our bodily needs and our so-called instinctive cravings. It is all that we have in common with the beasts together with all that we share with the lowliest of our own human kind. But in addition to this there are seemingly unconscious factors in our nature which, far from being sub--human, constitute the drive of our nature toward experiences and activities of a kind more developed and more lucid than our extant ordinary conscious nature.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Other texts
Origine: The Great Certainty http://web.archive.org/web/20090723055942/http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/thegreatcertainty.html

“Militarists also were strongly opposed to the new invention; for in the cheap and efficient production of illusory sexual embraces they saw a danger even more serious than contraception. The supply of cannon-fodder would decline.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 2. A Busy World (p. 33)

“I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 1. The Starting Point (p. 11)

“The great world to which I am native has long ago outgrown the myths, the toys, the bogies of your infant world. There, one lives without the fear of death and pain, though there one dies and suffers. There, one knows no lust to triumph over other men, no fear of being enslaved. There one loves without craving to possess, worships without thought of salvation, contemplates without pride of spirit. There one is free as none in your world is free, yet obedient as none of you is obedient.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Origine: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter IX: On Earth and On Neptune.

“Thus, little by little, it came about, as so often before, that the Star Maker outgrew his creature. Increasingly he frowned upon the loveliness that he still cherished. Then, seemingly with a conflict of reverence and impatience, he set our cosmos in its place among his other works.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 179)

“Little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts, and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, and obtuseness of the spirit.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

“Increasingly I suspected that this race, in spite of all its triumphs, was now living on the great ideas of its past, mouthing concepts that it no longer had the sensibility to understand, paying verbal homage to ideals which it could no longer sincerely will, and behaving within a system of institutions many of which could only be worked successfully by minds of a slightly finer temper.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 3. The Prospects of the Race (p. 39)

“He saw that their distinctive virtue lay in their finitude, their minute particularity, their tortured balance between dullness and lucidity; and that to save them from these would be to annihilate them.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 178)

“[T]his 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.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 231)

“Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Preface (p. 3)
Star Maker (1937)

“It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects: as the spirit’s particular creative mood that had given rise to me, the cosmos; and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit.
Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

“But the most lasting agony of this war was suffered, not by the defeated, but by the victors. For when their passion had cooled the Americans could not easily disguise from themselves that they had committed murder. They were not at heart a brutal folk, but rather a kindly. They liked to think of the world as a place of innocent pleasure-seeking, and of themselves as the main purveyors of delight. Yet they had been somehow drawn into this fantastic crime; and henceforth an all-pervading sense of collective guilt warped the American mind. They had ever been vainglorious and intolerant; but now these qualities in them became extravagant even to insanity. Both as individuals and collectively, they became increasingly frightened of criticism, increasingly prone to blame and hate, increasingly self-righteous, increasingly hostile to the critical intelligence, increasingly superstitious.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 3, “Europe Murdered” (p. 41)

“Grotesque sentiments such as the lust of business success or economic power of any kind, and indeed every purely self-regarding passion, from that of the social climber to that of the salvation-seeking ascetic, are experienced by the explorer with something of that shame which the child, emerging into adolescence, may feel toward the still-clinging fascination of his outgrown toys, or with such disgust as the youth may feel when he wakes from some unworthy sexual infatuation”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Origine: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter II: Exploring the Past.

“The economic life of the human race had for some time been based on coal, but latterly oil had been found a far more convenient source of power; and as the oil store of the planet was much smaller than its coal store, and the expenditure of oil had of course been wholly uncontrolled and wasteful, a shortage was already being felt. Thus the national ownership of the remaining oil fields had become a main factor in politics and a fertile source of wars.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 4, “The Russo-German War” (pp. 29-30)

“Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 1, “The Appearance of a New Species” (p. 102)

“Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Preface to English Edition (p. 9)
Last and First Men (1930)

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