Stanislaw Lem Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature. — Stanislaw Lem

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 ... — Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

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

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed ... The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing. — Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

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

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

We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands of millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint ... a symphony ... but we lack the ears to hear it. — 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

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 chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible — 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! — Stanislaw Lem

The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes. — Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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. — Stanislaw Lem

Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles ... — 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

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

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

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

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. — Stanislaw Lem

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

I always thought there would be ice in hell — 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

Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start. — Stanislaw Lem

One of the most incredible secrets of science fiction (although one not too closely guarded) is the fact that 99 percent of its authors do not know even the titles and authors of today's learned works, but still they want to top these scholars with their knowledge of the year 6000. — Stanislaw Lem

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures. — 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

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. — Stanislaw Lem

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on. — Stanislaw Lem

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

I believe in no final solutions. — 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

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

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

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness. — 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

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

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained. — Stanislaw Lem

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. — Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

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

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

Even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us. — Stanislaw Lem

We are the cause of our own sufferings. — Stanislaw Lem

Gibarian belonged to what may well have been the last generation of researchers who had the courage to refer back to the glory days of optimism and were not averse to their own kind of faith, which went beyond the boundaries laid — Stanislaw Lem

It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. — 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

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

A real tank now costs about a million dollars, while a hallucinated one amounts to less than one-hundredth of a cent per person, or centispecter per spectator. A destroyer costs a dime. Today you could fit the whole arsenal of the United States inside a single truck. — 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

A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place.
The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world. — Stanislaw Lem

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. — Stanislaw Lem

The other hand neither was he a man, nor any sapient proteinoid of the glutinous-albuminous variety. The head was round and plump, with red cheeks, but for eyes it had two penny whistles, and for ears it had thuribles, which gave off a thick cloud of incense. He was dressed — 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

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

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

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines. — 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

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

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

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

But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat. — Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

Above the podium stood a decorated board showing the agenda for the day. The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second - the ecology crisis, the third - the air pollution crisis, the fourth - the energy crisis, the fifth - the food crisis. Then adjournment. — Stanislaw Lem

General Apollon Diaz was currently in power and leaned toward the position of the hawks, which was to meet force with force. The proposal had already been made at Parliament (which stood in permanent emergency session) to counterattack: to pull twice the number of teeth from the political prisoners the abductors were demanding and mail them poste restante, as the address of guerrilla headquarters was unknown. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
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.
- Love and Tensor Algebra — Stanislaw Lem

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

Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious ... Space is, after all, solid, monolithic ... Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature. — Stanislaw Lem

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