Top 100 Stanislaw Quotes
#1. Churches were shut down and Stanislaw's father and three uncles had been sent to prison camps for speaking out.
Fannie Flagg
#2. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanislaw Lem
#3. 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
#4. 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
#10. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#11. The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#12. A well-read fool is the most pestilent of blockheads; his learning is a flail which he knows not how to handle, and with which he breaks his neighbor's shins as well as his own. Keep a fellow of this description at arm's length, as you value the integrity of your bones.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#13. 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
#14. Many who had been ahead of their time, had to wait for her in very uncomfortable quarters.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#15. There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".
Stanislaw Ulam
#16. It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.
Stanislaw Ulam
#17. 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
#19. Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.
Stanislaw Lem
#20. A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
Stanislaw Lem
#22. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
#24. 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
#27. Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.
Stanislaw Ulam
#28. 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
#29. You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.
Stanislaw Lem
#30. Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.
Stanislaw Lem
#31. For truly, what computer has not asked whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous instructions?
Stanislaw Lem
#33. Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.
Stanislaw Ulam
#35. The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer.
Stanislaw Ulam
#36. I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
Stanislaw Lem
#39. Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.
Stanislaw Lem
#40. 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
#41. Esteem has more engaging charms than friendship, or even love. It captivates hearts better, and never makes ings.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#42. The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
Stanislaw Lem
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Whenever man begins to doubt himself, he does something so stupid that he is reassured.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#47. 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
#48. We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to applyit.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#49. 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
#51. He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.
Stanislaw Lem
#52. The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Stanislaw Lem
#53. How many persons fancy they have experience simply because they have grown old!
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. Who ever asked theses and antitheses if they want to become syntheses?
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#66. 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
#68. It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded
Stanislaw Lem
#69. In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.
Stanislaw Ulam
#73. Everything must go its own way. One has to plow in order to sow, one has to sow in order to harvest, and what is disturbing has to be weeded out, like a bad weed.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#75. There's nothing new under the sun - everything can be traced
back to Archimedes or even earlier.
Stanislaw Ulam
#77. We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors.
Stanislaw Lem
#78. Never saw the branch you are sittin on, unless they are trying to hang you from it.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#79. 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
#80. When the truth offends no one it should come from our lips as naturally as the air we breathe.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#81. 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
#82. Their bodies were so close together that there was no room for real affection.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#85. To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#86. A dream will always triumph over reality , once it is given a chance..
Stanislaw Lem
#87. Those who put blinders on their eyes should remember that the set also includes bridle and a whip.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#90. I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.
Stanislaw Ulam
#91. I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#92. First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#95. Even the masochists tell everything when tortured. From sheer gratitude.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#96. A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.
Stanislaw Lem
#99. From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.
Stanislaw Lem
#100. 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
