Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot c… - Stanisław Lem

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Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?

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About Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish satirical, philosophical, and science fiction writer.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Stanislav Lem
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Additional quotes by Stanisław Lem

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.

Really, Tichy. Don’t be so demonic. Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. Did you read today’s Herald? The government of Pakistan claims that in this year’s famine only 970,000 perished, while the opposition gives a figure of six million. In such a world where are you going to find Chablis, pheasants, tenderloin with sauce béarnaise? The last pheasant died a quarter of a century ago. That bird is a corpse, only excellently preserved, for we have become masters of its mummification — or rather: we have learned how to hide its death.

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