Presently, however, we learned to contemplate the whole great saga of man as a completed work of art, and to admire it no less for its sudden and tragic end than for the promise in it which was not to be fulfilled. Grief was now transfigured wholly into…
Book 1930
Last and First Men quotes
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About the book
A voice from two thousand million years in the future tells the history of humanity from the twentieth century onward, through eighteen successive human species living on Earth, Venus and Neptune. Empires rise and fall, minds are remade, and whole ages pass in a few pages. It is less a novel of characters than a vast, poetic history of the human race and its place among the stars.
6 quotes
Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement…
But this we know: that we ourselves, when the spirit is most awake in us, admire the Real as it is revealed to us, and salute its dark-bright form with joy.
What next? Surely, you think, there will come a time when there will be no further heights to conquer. This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that stand in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by cloud, rise…
This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book…
But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good…