Stanisław Lem Quotes

If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?

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

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

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

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.

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

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?

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.

We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.

I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.

Furious and wild with fear, the potatoes flailed the air with their leaves and stamped their roots, but obviously this got them nowhere.

I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.

A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.The Twenty-first Voyage

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.

A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.

Simulant - something that doesn't exist but pretends to....Dissimulant - an object that exists but pretends not to.

One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?