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Top Stanisaw Lem Quotes

Browse top 75 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Stanisaw Lem.

Favorite Stanisaw Lem Quotes

1. "Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world—outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes—has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate." ~ Stanisław Lem
2. "A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.The Twenty-first Voyage" ~ Stanisław Lem
3. "As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer's choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance--which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex." ~ Stanisław Lem
4. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
5. "...it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city's transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name - street, level, square - and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or - finally - on foot; therefore, four maps" ~ Stanisław Lem
6. "El cosmos es infinito y sin fronteras, y tampoco tiene límites su odio, y cada día, cada hora, puede alcanzarnos" ~ Stanisław Lem
7. "Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing!" ~ Stanisław Lem
8. "In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing." ~ Stanisław Lem
9. "A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place.The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world." ~ Stanisław Lem
10. "I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet." ~ Stanisław Lem
11. "We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos." ~ Stanisław Lem
12. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
13. "Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote." ~ Stanisław Lem
14. "I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments." ~ Stanisław Lem
15. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
16. "One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'." ~ Stanisław Lem
17. "¿Sabes, por casualidad, si existió alguna vez una fe en un dios… imperfecto?(...) Es el único dios en el que yo podría creer, un dios cuya pasión no es una redención, un dios que no salva nada, que no sirve para nada: un dios que simplemente es." ~ Stanisław Lem
18. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
19. "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" ~ Stanisław Lem
20. "A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn't create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he's born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that's impossible, since a person who isn't brought up among people cannot become a person." ~ Stanisław Lem
21. "General Apollon Diaz was currently in power and leaned toward the position of the hawks, which was to meet force with force. The proposal had already been made at Parliament (which stood in permanent emergency session) to counterattack: to pull twice the number of teeth from the political prisoners the abductors were demanding and mail them poste restante, as the address of guerrilla headquarters was unknown." ~ Stanisław Lem
22. "Jakze falszywe i niemadre jest lekanie sie smierci jako stanu, który zasluguje raczej na apologie! Cóz moze sie równac z doskonaloscia nieistnienia? Zapewne, prowadzaca don agonia, jako taka, nie stanowi zjawiska atrakcyjnego, ale z drugiej strony nie bylo jeszcze nikogo tak slabego duchem czy cialem, kto by jej nie wytrzymal i nie potrafil calkowicie, bez reszty i do samiutenkiego konca skonac." ~ Stanisław Lem
23. "Anyhow, the criterion of common sense was never applicable to the history of the human race. Averroës, Kant, Socrates, Newton, Voltaire, could any of them have believed it possible that in the twentieth century the scourge of cities, the poisoner of lungs, the mass murderer and idol of millions would be a metal receptacle on wheels, and that people would actually prefer being crushed to death inside it during frantic weekends exoduses instead of staying, safe and sound, at home?" ~ Stanisław Lem
24. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
25. "Nosotros contamos la verdad por cuanto en los cuentos triunfa la verdad.- Fábulas de Robots" ~ Stanisław Lem
26. "Si uno busca tranquilidad, silencio y serenidad, que no lo busque en su vida ya que encontrará todo y más en el cementerio." ~ Stanisław Lem
27. "sufficiently persistent and unceasing. He was trained in the well-known, classic bioelectronic line of research of the Eurasian school, which included Cho-En-Min," ~ Stanisław Lem
28. "«El hombre que no cuenta con ningún objetivo en la vida, tiene que creárselo»." ~ Stanisław Lem
29. "I didn't believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication—that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But" ~ Stanisław Lem
30. "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?" ~ Stanisław Lem
31. "Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible." ~ Stanisław Lem
32. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
33. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
34. "I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over." ~ Stanisław Lem
35. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
36. "We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.... We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (1970 English translation)" ~ Stanisław Lem
37. "The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass." ~ Stanisław Lem
38. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
39. "The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself." ~ Stanisław Lem
40. "Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?" ~ Stanisław Lem
41. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
42. "Come, let us hasten to a higher planeWhere dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,Their indices bedecked from one to nCommingled in an endless Markov chain!I'll grant thee random access to my heart,Thou'lt 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.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.- Love and Tensor Algebra" ~ Stanisław Lem
43. "Have it compose a poem- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, 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!!" [sic]…. Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide." ("The First Sally (A) or The Electronic Bard" THE CYBERIAD)" ~ Stanisław Lem
44. "...all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells." ~ Stanisław Lem
45. "Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable." ~ Stanisław Lem
46. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
47. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
48. "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!" ~ Stanisław Lem
49. "If a man who can't count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?" ~ Stanisław Lem
50. "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." ~ Stanisław Lem
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Today's Quote

I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?"
Author: Anne Perry

What Did Stanisław Lem Talk About?

Wit
Ear
Con
Thin
Sin
Per
Lie
Hum
Hen
Here
End
Read
Ten
Era
Self
Sing
Thou
Tie
Tan
Hey
Son
Lit
Act
Los
Ears
Bee
Chin
Worlds
Use
Rate
Plan
She
Cannot
Cent
Sea
Air
Able
King
Ought
Less
Owe
Again
Idea
Behind
Does
Planet
Each
Ally
Seek
Civil

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