Stanisław Lem Short Quotes

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The rationalist's substitute for demonology - statistics.

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

Stanisław Lem
The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanisław Lem
You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.

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

Stanisław Lem
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

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

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

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

Stanisław Lem
It is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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.

Stanisław Lem