Stanislaw Lem
Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.Collection: Trust
Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.Collection: Business
A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.Collection: Chance
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.Collection: World
Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.Collection: Art
There are no answers, only choices.Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Morality
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.Collection: Get Money
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.Collection: Lying
A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.Collection: Ignorance
For moral reasons I am an atheist - for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.Collection: Believe
He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.Collection: Has Beens
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.Collection: Smart
Not only does God play dice with the world He does not let us see what He has rolled.Collection: Play
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Art
Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Giving Up
I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.Collection: Feelings
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.Collection: Doe
Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.Collection: Ugly
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.Collection: Mirrors
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Desire
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Dream
Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Children
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...Collection: Tunes
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.Collection: Believe
The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.Collection: Genre Is
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.Collection: Philosophical
Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?Collection: Worst
There are friends with whom we share neither interests nor any particular experiences, friends with whom we never correspond, whom we seldom meet and then only by chance, but whose existence nonetheless has for us a special if uncanny meaning. For me the Eiffel Tower is just such a friend, and not merely because it happens to be the symbol of a city, for Paris leaves me neither hot nor cold. I first became aware of this attachment of mine when reading in the paper about plans for its demolition, the mere thought of which filled me with alarm.Collection: Reading
Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.Collection: Running
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Ideas
The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.Collection: Horse
I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.Collection: Analysis
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.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Mean
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!Collection: Humorous
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Humorous