Stanislaw Lem Quotes

Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing!

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

Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will.

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.

Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.

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

The most recent of the iamides, heavily advertised - authentium. Creates synthetic recollections of things that never happened. A few grams of dantine, for instance, and a man goes around with a deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy. Why anyone would want that is another matter and quite beyond me.

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

When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to be found in outer space, nor any nebular debris - in those good old days ...

Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter - for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect.

The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain.

All the wild beasts have been extinct for years, but it's perfectly possible to synthesize them autobiogenically. On the other hand, why be bound to what was once produced by natural evolution? The spokesman for surrealist zoology was most eloquent - we should populate our preserves with bold, original conceptions, not slavish imitations, we should forge the New, not plagiarize the Old.

In just the last issue of Science Today there had been an article on some new psychotropic agents of the group of so-called benignimizers (the N,N-dimethylpeptocryptomides), which induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. Yes, yes! I could practically see that article now. Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felicitine, Empathan, Ecstasine, Halcyonal and a whole spate of derivatives. Though by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl, you obtained instead Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine, Dementium, Flagellan, Juggernol and many other polyparanoidal stimulants of the group of so-called phrensobarbs (for these prompted the most vicious behavior, the lashing out at objects animate as well as inanimate - and especially powerful here were the cannibal-cannabinols and manicomimetics).

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

It's true that even though I'm a world unto myself, I've just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!

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

And perhaps Solaris is the cradle of your divine child, Snow went on, with a widening grin that increased the number of lines round his eyes. Solaris could be the first phase of the despairing God. Perhaps its intelligence will grow enormously. All the contents of our Solarist libraries could be just a record of his teething troubles ...

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

The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.

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

What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?'
'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose
a god who simply is.

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

Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world - outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes - has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate.

We are the cause of our own sufferings.

As long as Nature's actions in the animate and inanimate world fill us with wonder and offer an unmatched example for us, a realm of solutions that exceeds in its perfection and complexity everything we can achieve ourselves, the number of unknowns will be bigger than our knowledge. It is only when we are eventually able to compete with Nature on the level of creation, when we have learned to copy it so that we can discover all of its limitations as a Designer, that we shall enter the realm of freedom, of being able to work out a creative strategy subordinated to our goals.

We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don't say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime - in the meantime, we're not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits.

It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits.

A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting.

The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.

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

Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain? These terms can be used, but the new scale of magnitude brings with it new regularities and new phenomena.

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

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

Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.

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

You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there's no way to tell if that grandmother's Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus.

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

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.

According to Lem's Law, 'No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets'
owing to general lack of time, the oversupply of books, and the perfection of advertising.

There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize
it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.

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.

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

He also said - pointedly - that space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one's absence. And indeed I couldn't deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole - especially when returning from a long voyage - to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato.

Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.

Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth - the part of it we pass over in silence - we're unable to come to terms with it!

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.

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good, mind you. The rest had to be shoved somewhere out of sight, under the rug. Which History indeed did, at times politely, at times police-ly, and yet something was always sticking out, breaking loose, overthrowing.

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

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

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

He assumed a manner that could be called circular irony. Everything he said, he said in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of someone playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles. Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words.

Practically all SF is trash.

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

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

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? 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 ...

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer's choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance
which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex.

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.

Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn't mention it.

Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.

How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed in space? Do we need to travel everywhere bringing destructive power on our ships, so as to smash anything that runs counter to our understanding?

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn't create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he's born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that's impossible, since a person who isn't brought up among people cannot become a person.

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

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed ... that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

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

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

Cripple God, who always desires more than he's able to have, and doesn't always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure.

Following the eruption [that took the life] of the 106, and for the first time in Solarist studies, there were petitions demanding thermo-nuclear attacks on the ocean.

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

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

I always thought there would be ice in hell

Maybe he fought it off and forgot about it, and he wasn't afraid, because he knew he'd never carry it out. Right, but now, imagine that suddenly, in broad daylight, among other people, he meets IT embodied, chained to him, indestructible. What then? What do you have then?

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

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

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

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

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

Chapulier's Rule (the law of least resistance). If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But 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.
...
The Great Mendacitor, for example, for nine years in charge of the Saturn meliorization project, did absolutely nothing on that planet, sending out piles of fake progress reports, invoices, requisition forms, and either bribed his supervisors or kept them in a state of electronic shock.

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

We are only seeking Man. We have no need for 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. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior of our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past." -Snow from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!

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

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.

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

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.

Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.

Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.

Have it compose a poem- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!!" [sic] ... .
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide."
("The First Sally (A) or The Electronic Bard"
THE CYBERIAD)

And since no one any longer responds to things spontaneously-you take drugs to study, drugs to love, drugs to rise up in revolt, drugs to forget-the distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has ceased to exist.

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

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.

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.

For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

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

What is a poem then? [ ... ] I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate shining segments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That's how it is in daylight. At night [ ... ] poems are like spiriling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness.