Stanisław Lem Quotes

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

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. ...

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now re...

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding ab...

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

What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is t...

The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larg...

On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her...

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further cons...

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start r...

Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that t...

And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets...

One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythic...

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

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

A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? I...

How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed i...

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing ...

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own lab...

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believe...

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of...

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

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

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

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

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King’s polynomial blows, ...

Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layma...

Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that...

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

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

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not...

So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is mathematically ...

A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. T...

Furious and wild with fear, the potatoes flailed the air with their leaves and stamped their roots, ...

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

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

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

The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how u...

Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on ...

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

Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is b...

Come now, Tichy. For half a century civilization hasn't been left to its own devices. A hundred year...

Chapulier's Rule (the law of least resistance). If the machine is not too bright and incapable of re...

We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentr...

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

He also said - pointedly - that space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That...

A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only....

It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construc...

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

I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by ...

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What?...

All the wild beasts have been extinct for years, but it's perfectly possible to synthesize them auto...

We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A sing...

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. ...