Stanisław Lem Quotes

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

The ancients used to say: mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur — the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.

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

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.

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.

What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities, where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women — and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again. I shall find new interests and occupations; and I shall not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody.

I was already thinking there was no way out of the vicious circle of madness — after all, no one can think with anything but his brain, no one can be outside himself to check whether the processes taking place in his body are normal.

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

"No insults, please!" said Pugg. "For I am not your usual uncouth pirate, but refined and with a Ph.D., and therefore extremely high-strung."

Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.

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.

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.

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

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 chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible