Stanisław Lem Quotes

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! <p> 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. <p> 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.<p>

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

humanity is a hunchback who, in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump, because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental,

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.

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

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!

When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.

Dopóki nie skorzystałem z Internetu, nie wiedziałem, że na świecie jest tylu idiotów.

It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construct and accept, having as it does a deep sense of “understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly improbable. This way of thinking, so modest in its assessment of our abilities, is probably the only way recommended, given our lack of knowledge, because we are not aware of our limitations.

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

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.

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.

If you should be afflicted with a hump, for example, but firmly believe the Almighty somehow needs your hump to realize His Cosmic Design and that it was therefore or­dained along with the rest of Creation, why, then you may be easily reconciled to your deformity. If, however, they tell you that it's merely the result of a misplaced molecule, an atom or two that happened to go the wrong way, then noth­ing remains for you but to bay at the moon.

He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?

"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)