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… - Stanisław Lem

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

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.

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.

Faith as well as science endowed the visible world with properties that eliminated blind, incalculable chance as the author of all events. 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...