I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all th… - Olaf Stapledon

The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

Throughout man's career intelligence and charity have been man's distinctive and most valuable assets. One of our early pre-human ancestors is said to have been much like the Spectral Tarsier, a little mammal about the size of a mouse, with long wiry fingers and huge forward-looking eyes adapted for binocular vision. Not by weapons but by correlation of subtle eyes and subtle hands through subtle brain, this creature triumphed. And man himself conquered the world by the same means, by attention, by discrimination, by skilled manipulation, by versatility; in fact by intelligence and imagination in adapting himself to an ever-changing environment.

Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.