In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together, ” but they never really got there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For everyone searched his neighbour’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified. Olaf Stapledon
Some Similar Quotes
  1. All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart. - Tahereh Mafi
  2. Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love - Unknown
  3. Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry... I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you. - Charles M. Schulz
  4. It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being. - John Joseph Powell
  5. How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen... - Margaret Atwood
More Quotes By Olaf Stapledon
  1. 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.
  2. There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos...
  3. Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could...
  4. For the former, activity, any kind of activity, was an end in itself; for the latter, activity was but a progress toward the true end, which was rest, and peace of mind. Action was to be undertaken only when equilibrium was disturbed.
  5. 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...
Related Topics