Top 100 Stanislaw Lem Quotes
#1. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanislaw Lem
#2. Then what exactly is it that you design?"
He gave a proud smile.
"Bitless compositions."
"Bitless? You mean, from bits, the units of information?"
"No, Mr. Tichy, the units of being bitten.
Stanislaw Lem
#3. Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles ...
Stanislaw Lem
#4. I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
Stanislaw Lem
#5. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.
Stanislaw Lem
#6. Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.
Stanislaw Lem
#7. A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
Stanislaw Lem
#8. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
#9. We have named all the stars and all the planet, even though they might already have had names of their own. What a nerve!
Stanislaw Lem
#10. Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
Stanislaw Lem
#11. Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.
Stanislaw Lem
#12. For truly, what computer has not asked whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous instructions?
Stanislaw Lem
#13. Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.
Stanislaw Lem
#14. Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Stanislaw Lem
#15. Above the podium stood a decorated board showing the agenda for the day. The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second - the ecology crisis, the third - the air pollution crisis, the fourth - the energy crisis, the fifth - the food crisis. Then adjournment.
Stanislaw Lem
#16. Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious ... Space is, after all, solid, monolithic ... Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.
Stanislaw Lem
#17. Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain? These terms can be used, but the new scale of magnitude brings with it new regularities and new phenomena.
Stanislaw Lem
#18. It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!
Stanislaw Lem
#19. He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.
Stanislaw Lem
#20. The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Stanislaw Lem
#21. It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits.
Stanislaw Lem
#22. But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.
Stanislaw Lem
#23. It's true that even though I'm a world unto myself, I've just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!
Stanislaw Lem
#24. It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded
Stanislaw Lem
#25. There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize
it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.
Stanislaw Lem
#26. Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.
Stanislaw Lem
#27. A dream will always triumph over reality , once it is given a chance..
Stanislaw Lem
#28. A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.
Stanislaw Lem
#29. ;he was at home whenever he could quench his thirst for knowledge; ...
Stanislaw Lem
#30. Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanislaw Lem
#31. Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Stanislaw Lem
#32. Manufacturers these days have peculiar problems: a package may recommend the virtues of its product by voice only, for it is not allowed to grab the customer by the sleeve or collar.
Stanislaw Lem
#33. I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
Stanislaw Lem
#34. It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.
Stanislaw Lem
#35. Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?
Stanislaw Lem
#36. Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
Stanislaw Lem
#37. What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?'
'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose
a god who simply is.
Stanislaw Lem
#38. It was not possible to think except with one's brain, no one could stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his inner processes.
Stanislaw Lem
#39. Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
Stanislaw Lem
#40. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. (tr. by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox)
Stanislaw Lem
#41. Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.
Stanislaw Lem
#42. These views were voiced by the school of 'optessimists', i.e. philosophers who derived optimism for the future from a pessimistic appraisal of the present. The 21st Voyage, The Star Diaries
Stanislaw Lem
#43. The number of one's possible fantasies is inversely proportional to the amount of one's liquid assets. For him who has everything dreams are no longer possible.
Stanislaw Lem
#44. Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
Stanislaw Lem
#45. The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
Stanislaw Lem
#46. How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can't even understand one another?
Stanislaw Lem
#47. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our symptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
Stanislaw Lem
#48. There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.
Stanislaw Lem
#49. The Universe is picking us off one by one. Yesterday part of the poop deck went, and with it all the toilets.
Stanislaw Lem
#50. A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.
Stanislaw Lem
#51. A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.
The Twenty-first Voyage
Stanislaw Lem
#52. You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there's no way to tell if that grandmother's Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus.
Stanislaw Lem
#53. We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth - the part of it we pass over in silence - we're unable to come to terms with it!
Stanislaw Lem
#54. If a man who can't count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Stanislaw Lem
#55. I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw Lem
#56. Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.
Stanislaw Lem
#57. If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently
Stanislaw Lem
#58. Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.
Stanislaw Lem
#59. She was beautiful all right, beautiful in a way that was at once seductive, demonic, and raspberry.
Stanislaw Lem
#60. Every part contained a memory of the other parts it was directly attached to.
Stanislaw Lem
#61. Something peculiar is happening to my head. I remember that my father was Barnaby, but I had another named Balaton. Unless that's a lake in Albania.
Stanislaw Lem
#62. Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing!
Stanislaw Lem
#63. I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanislaw Lem
#64. Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind.
Stanislaw Lem
#65. Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?
Stanislaw Lem
#66. I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
Stanislaw Lem
#67. My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.
Stanislaw Lem
#68. The other hand neither was he a man, nor any sapient proteinoid of the glutinous-albuminous variety. The head was round and plump, with red cheeks, but for eyes it had two penny whistles, and for ears it had thuribles, which gave off a thick cloud of incense. He was dressed
Stanislaw Lem
#69. Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start.
Stanislaw Lem
#70. According to Lem's Law, 'No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets'
owing to general lack of time, the oversupply of books, and the perfection of advertising.
Stanislaw Lem
#72. And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
Stanislaw Lem
#73. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands of millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint ... a symphony ... but we lack the ears to hear it.
Stanislaw Lem
#74. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
Stanislaw Lem
#75. We didn't know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn't make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don't have any regrets. No regrets.
Stanislaw Lem
#76. Maybe he fought it off and forgot about it, and he wasn't afraid, because he knew he'd never carry it out. Right, but now, imagine that suddenly, in broad daylight, among other people, he meets IT embodied, chained to him, indestructible. What then? What do you have then?
Stanislaw Lem
#77. Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn't mention it.
Stanislaw Lem
#78. But how can I use a method to discredit that very method, if the method is discreditable?
Stanislaw Lem
#79. One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.
Stanislaw Lem
#80. One of the most incredible secrets of science fiction (although one not too closely guarded) is the fact that 99 percent of its authors do not know even the titles and authors of today's learned works, but still they want to top these scholars with their knowledge of the year 6000.
Stanislaw Lem
#81. I wanted to stop her; in the darkness and silence we occasionally managed to throw off our despair for a while by making each other forget.
Stanislaw Lem
#82. How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed in space? Do we need to travel everywhere bringing destructive power on our ships, so as to smash anything that runs counter to our understanding?
Stanislaw Lem
#83. he could come up with a better idea than anything proposed by all the scientists, the cyberneticians and strategists, with all their computers?
Stanislaw Lem
#84. Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible.
Stanislaw Lem
#85. Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard
Stanislaw Lem
#86. War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.
Stanislaw Lem
#87. Following the eruption [that took the life] of the 106, and for the first time in Solarist studies, there were petitions demanding thermo-nuclear attacks on the ocean.
Stanislaw Lem
#88. I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed ... that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.
Stanislaw Lem
#89. I had noticed that I had no difficulty conversing with robots, because absolutely nothing surprised them. They were incapable of surprise. A very sensible quality.
Stanislaw Lem
#90. Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life; yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.
Stanislaw Lem
#91. You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
Stanislaw Lem
#92. Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.
Stanislaw Lem
#93. Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated.
Stanislaw Lem
#94. I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.
Stanislaw Lem
#95. For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.
Stanislaw Lem
#96. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.
Stanislaw Lem
#97. Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
Stanislaw Lem
#98. All perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells.
Stanislaw Lem
#100. Even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.
Stanislaw Lem
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