Stanisław Lem Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Stanisław Lem
The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.

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

Stanisław Lem
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.

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

Stanisław Lem
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.

Stanisław Lem