Stanisław Lem Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Stanisław Lem
He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?

Stanisław Lem
Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.

Stanisław Lem
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
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.

Stanisław Lem
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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.

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

Stanisław Lem
A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

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

Stanisław Lem
The rationalist's substitute for demonology - statistics.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.

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

Stanisław Lem
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.

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

Stanisław Lem
Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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...

Stanisław Lem
The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that Finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem
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...

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

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem