Stanislaw Lem Quotes

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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! ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

Manufacturers these days have peculiar problems: a package may recommend the virtues of its product by voice only, for it is not allowed to grab the customer by the sleeve or collar. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

Aisles and aisles of absolventina, theopathine, genuflix, orisol. An enormous place; organ music in the background while you shop. All the faiths are represented too - there's chistendine and antichristendine, ormuzal, arymanol, anabaptiban, methadone, brahmax, supralapsarian suppositories, and zoroaspics, quaker oats, yogart, mishnameal and apocryphal dip. Pills, tablets, syrups, elixirs, powders, gums - they even have lollipops for the children. Many of the boxes come with halos. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

Suppose that which is taking place here and now is not reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the machine: a reader might well wonder why you and your companions are shaped like spheres, inasmuch as that sphericality serves no purpose in the narration and would appear to be a wholly superfluous embellishment ... ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

I didn't believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication - that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But ~ Stanislaw Lem

Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist. ~ Stanislaw Lem

My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra 's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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) ~ Stanislaw Lem

Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

The semanticists maintained that everything depends on how you interpret the words "potato," "is" and "moving." Since the key here is the operational copula "is," one must examine "is" rigorously. Whereupon they set to work on an Encyclopedia of Cosmic Semasiology, devoting the first four volumes to a discussion of the operational referents of "is." The neopositivists maintained that it is not clusters of potatoes one directly perceives, but clusters of sensory impressions. Then, employing symbolic logic, they created terms for "cluster of impressions" and "cluster of potatoes," devised a special calculus of propositions all in algebraic signs and after using up several seas of ink reached the mathematically precise and absolutely undeniable conclusion that 0=0. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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 ... ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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? ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Practically all SF is trash. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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 ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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? ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

I always thought there would be ice in hell ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing! ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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! ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Come now, Tichy. For half a century civilization hasn't been left to its own devices. A hundred years ago a certain Dior was dictating fashions in clothing. Today this sort of regulating has embraced all walks of life. If prostheticism is voted in, I assure you, in a couple of years everyone will consider the possession of a soft, hairy, sweating body to be shameful and indecent. A body needs washing, deodorizing, caring for, and even then it breaks down, while in a prostheticized society you can snap on the loveliest creations of modern engineering. What woman doesn't want to have silver iodide instead of eyes, telescoping breasts, angel's wings, iridescent legs, and feet that sing with every step? ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Giese was an unemotional man, but then in the study of Solaris emotion is a hindrance to the explorer. Imagination and premature theorizing are positive disadvantages in approaching a planet where - as has become clear - anything is possible ... The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize. ~ Stanislaw Lem

The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rests on that universal order ... ~ Stanislaw Lem

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain? ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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 ... ~ Stanislaw Lem