Stanislaw Lem Quotes

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.

I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

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

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

Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.

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

The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.

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

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.

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

Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

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

Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

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.

How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?

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

A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.

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

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

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...

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.

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

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.

I believe in no final solutions.

It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.

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

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.

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.

Practically all SF is trash.

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.

I'll grant the random access to my heart, Thoul't 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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.

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

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.