Stanislaw Lem Quotes

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

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.

I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.

If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?

Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.

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.

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.

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.

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

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.

If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.

For moral reasons I am an atheist - for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.

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.

We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.

You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.

Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.

Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!

Giese was an unemotional man, but then in the study of Solaris emotion is a hindrance to the explorer. Imagination and premature theorizing are positive disadvantages in approaching a planet where-as has become clear-anything is possible... The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize.

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.

A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.

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.

There are no answers, only choices.

I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.

You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.

Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.

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.

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

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.

Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.

How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?

A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

The first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% of the job requires another 90% of the time. The first condition of immortality is death.

...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter - for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had - first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine.

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.

For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.

The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.

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.

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.