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 … - Stanisław 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)

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

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.

It was not that the ocean depths served the creatures there with darkness, to protect them from attack — a darkness they could light, as they needed, with luminescence — but vice versa: the darkness gave rise to those that were pressure-resistant and could illuminate themselves.