# Quote — Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men

> Very seldom, only in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper insight into the world’s nature and man’s. And no sooner had this precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dared not look down the precipice of fact.

- Author: [Olaf Stapledon](https://www.leafyquotes.com/olaf-stapledon.md)
- Book: [Last And First Men](https://www.leafyquotes.com/olaf-stapledon/last-and-first-men.md)
- Page: 195
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Olaf_Stapledon#Last_and_First_Men_(1930)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/olaf-stapledon/last-and-first-men/very-seldom-only

## More from this book

> Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself.

p. 229 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/olaf-stapledon/last-and-first-men/yet-though-time.md)

> [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.

p. 231 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/olaf-stapledon/last-and-first-men/t-his-is-the.md)

> 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.
>
> Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable.

p. 17 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/olaf-stapledon/last-and-first-men/socrates-woke-to-the.md)