Top 100 Lem's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. If a man who can't count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Stanislaw Lem
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The Universe is picking us off one by one. Yesterday part of the poop deck went, and with it all the toilets.
Stanislaw Lem
#8. There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.
Stanislaw Lem
#9. For moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally.
Stanislaw Lem
#10. 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
#11. How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can't even understand one another?
Stanislaw Lem
#12. The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
Stanislaw Lem
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way.
Stanislaw Lem
#16. And since no one any longer responds to things spontaneously-you take drugs to study, drugs to love, drugs to rise up in revolt, drugs to forget-the distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has ceased to exist.
Stanislaw Lem
#17. Lem searched for the words to convey what he felt. As he found the language to describe what the dog had meant to him, his chest grew tight with emotion.
Dean Koontz
#18. 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
#19. It is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanislaw Lem
#20. I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.
Stanislaw Lem
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.
Stanislaw Lem
#24. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.
Stanislaw Lem
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.
Stanislaw Lem
#28. Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard
Stanislaw Lem
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Many in the audience consider leaving.
If anyone leaves, let them leave.
The theatre is not a prison.
If anyone coughs, cough also.
The Theatre is not a sickbed.
We minister to the audience.
We revere the pains of the audience.
Lem Doolittle
#34. I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
Stanislaw Lem
#35. Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?
Stanislaw Lem
#36. Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind.
Stanislaw Lem
#37. Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Stanislaw Lem
#38. I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanislaw Lem
#39. Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing!
Stanislaw Lem
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.
Stanislaw Lem
#43. No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanislaw Lem
#44. Not only does God play dice with the world He does not let us see what He has rolled.
Stanislaw Lem
#45. Every part contained a memory of the other parts it was directly attached to.
Stanislaw Lem
#46. She was beautiful all right, beautiful in a way that was at once seductive, demonic, and raspberry.
Stanislaw Lem
#47. 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
#48. If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently
Stanislaw Lem
#49. He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#50. Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.
Stanislaw Lem
#51. I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw Lem
#52. Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.
Stanislaw Lem
#53. 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
#54. The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Stanislaw Lem
#55. He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.
Stanislaw Lem
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
Stanislaw Lem
#61. 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
#62. Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.
Stanislaw Lem
#63. I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
Stanislaw Lem
#64. For truly, what computer has not asked whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous instructions?
Stanislaw Lem
#65. 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
#66. You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.
Stanislaw Lem
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
#70. A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
Stanislaw Lem
#71. Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.
Stanislaw Lem
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanislaw Lem
#77. From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.
Stanislaw Lem
#78. Furious and wild with fear, the potatoes flailed the air with their leaves and stamped their roots, but obviously this got them nowhere.
Stanislaw Lem
#79. Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?
Stanislaw Lem
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rests on that universal order ...
Stanislaw Lem
#83. Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.
Stanislaw Lem
#84. 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
#85. Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Stanislaw Lem
#86. Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanislaw Lem
#87. ;he was at home whenever he could quench his thirst for knowledge; ...
Stanislaw Lem
#88. Humanity is a hunchback who, in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump, because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental,
Stanislaw Lem
#89. Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
Stanislaw Lem
#90. A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.
Stanislaw Lem
#91. A dream will always triumph over reality , once it is given a chance..
Stanislaw Lem
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors.
Stanislaw Lem
#95. It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded
Stanislaw Lem
#97. 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
#99. Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.
Stanislaw Lem
#100. Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.
Stanislaw Lem
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