Stanislaw Lem quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stanislaw Lem on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

For truly, what computer has not asked whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous instructions?

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

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

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

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

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

Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing!

All perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells.

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

But what am I going to see?
I don't know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.

She was beautiful all right, beautiful in a way that was at once seductive, demonic, and raspberry.

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

Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.

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

Something peculiar is happening to my head. I remember that my father was Barnaby, but I had another named Balaton. Unless that's a lake in Albania.

I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind.

Practically all SF is trash.

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

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

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

Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard

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

We are the cause of our own sufferings.

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

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

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

I believe in no final solutions.

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

Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.

It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded

The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.

I always thought there would be ice in hell

Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.

The Universe is picking us off one by one. Yesterday part of the poop deck went, and with it all the toilets.

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

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. (tr. by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox)

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

;he was at home whenever he could quench his thirst for knowledge; ...

But how can I use a method to discredit that very method, if the method is discreditable?

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

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.

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.

he could come up with a better idea than anything proposed by all the scientists, the cyberneticians and strategists, with all their computers?

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.

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

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

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

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

We have named all the stars and all the planet, even though they might already have had names of their own. What a nerve!

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

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

Every part contained a memory of the other parts it was directly attached to.

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.

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.

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

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

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

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

It was not possible to think except with one's brain, no one could stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his inner processes.

We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

I wanted to stop her; in the darkness and silence we occasionally managed to throw off our despair for a while by making each other forget.

There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

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.

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.

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

The chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible

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

From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.

When smashing monuments, save the pedestals. They always come in handy.

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

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

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

Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated.

And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.

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

Retribution for the death of comrades who had perished because they were sent to that death ...