Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Stanislaw Lem
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.
Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.
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.
I believe in no final solutions.
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
There are no answers, only choices.
If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
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.
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.
He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
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.
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.
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'll grant the random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.
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.
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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.
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.
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?
Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.
The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable.
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
I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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.
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.
Not only does God play dice with the world He does not let us see what He has rolled.
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.
Practically all SF is trash.
...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
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.
We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.
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.
A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.
Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.
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.
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.
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