56 Stanislaw Lem Quotes

Stanislaw Lem quotes

1. In an extreme instance, in which there is a Propervirt of less than 0.9%, the TEXT OF THE PRESENT PROSPECTUS may likewise undergo an ABRUPT change. If, while you are reading these sentences, the words begin to jump about, and the letters quiver and blur, please interrupt your reading for ten or twenty seconds to wipe your glasses, adjust your clothing, or the like, and then start reading AGAIN from the beginning, and NOT JUST from the place where your reading was interrupted, since such a TRANSFORMATION indicates that a correction of DEFICIENCIES is now taking place.

2. My pass had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe - certainly our Building was such an institution - the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.

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

4. The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes

5. Oh, I read good books, too, but only Earthside. Why that is, I don't really know. Never stopped to analyze it. 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. When they talk about outer space, they make you feel the silence, so unlike the Earthly kind - and the lifelessness. Whatever the adventures, the message is always the same: humans will never feel at home out there.

6. 'And do you believe in God?' 'I do.' 'But you didn't think a robot would, right?' 'Right.'

7. 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.

8. 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...

9. Starozytni mawiali: 'mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur'. Swiat laknie oszustw, wiec jest oszukiwany.

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

11. You are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are.

12. Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind- as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will...

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

14. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

15. Finis vitae sed non amoris

16. 'One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'.'

17. Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless void between the stars, how everything about us has become lined with it, how it darkly lurks behind each shred of matter. This is your work, envious one! And I hardly think the future generations will bless you for it...

18. Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. I have fundamental reservations to this adaptation. First of all I would have liked to see the planet Solaris which the director unfortunately denied me as the film was to be a cinematically subdued work. And secondly - as I told Tarkovsky during one of our quarrels - he didn't make Solaris at all, he made Crime and Punishment. What we get in the film is only how this abominable Kelvin has driven poor Harey to suicide and then he has pangs of conscience which are amplified by her appearance; a strange and incomprehensible appearance. [...]

22. The whole sphere of cognitive and epistemological considerations was extremely important in my book and it was tightly coupled to the solaristic literature and to the essence of solaristics as such. Unfortunately, the film has been robbed of those qualities rather thoroughly. [...]

23. My Kelvin decides to stay on the planet without any hope whatsoever while Tarkovsky created an image where some kind of an island appears, and on that island a hut. And when I hear about the hut and the island I'm beside myself with irritation... This is just some emotional sauce into which Tarkovsky has submerged his heroes, not to mention that he has completely amputated the scientific landscape and in its place introduced so much of the weirdness I cannot stand. [...]

24. I have to make it clear, however, that I haven't seen the whole film except for 20 minutes of the second part although I know the screenplay very well because Russians have a custom of making an extra copy for the author.

25. Tarkovsky reminds me of a sergeant from the time of Turgenev - he is very pleasant and extremely prepossessing and at the same time visionary and elusive. One cannot 'catch' him anywhere because he is always at a slightly different place already. This is simply the type of person he is. When I understood that I stopped bothering. This director cannot be reshaped anymore, and first of all one cannot convince him of anything as he is going to recast everything in his 'own way' no matter what.

26. Dopoki nie skorzystalem z Internetu, nie wiedzialem, ze na swiecie jest tylu idiotow. I didn't know that there are so many idiots, until I began using Internet.

27. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

28. Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.

29. Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

30. The theme he stresses in most of his work is that machines will someday be as human as Homo sapiens and perhaps superior to him. Mr. Lem has an almost Dickensian genius for vividly realizing the tragedy and comedy of future machines; the death of one of his androids or computers actually wrings sorrow from the reader. ~ Philip Jose Farmer in The New York Times (2 September 1984)

31. Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone. ~ Philip K. Dick

1. 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.

2. 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...

3. Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.

4. When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to be found in outer space, nor any nebular debris - in those good old days...

5. Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Cannibals prefer those who have no spines..

9. Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world (from where?), space is by far the less mysterious. It, too, undergoes transformations. Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would even say against human nature.

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

11. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.

12. People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.

13. Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness..

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.

15. Not only does God play dice with the world He does not let us see what He has rolled.

16. 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.

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

18. 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.

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

20. I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.

21. Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.