List of Stanislaw Lem Quotes

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.

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!

I Had No Hope. Yet Expectation Lived On In Me, The Last Thing She Had Left Behind. What Further Consummations, Mockeries, Torments Did I Still Anticipate? I Had No Idea As I Abided In The Unshaken Belief That The Time Of Cruel Wonders Was Not Yet Over.

In Riemann, Hilbert Or In Banach Space Let Superscripts And Subscripts Go Their Ways. Our Symptotes No Longer Out Of Phase, We Shall Encounter, Counting, Face To Face.

Giese Was An Unemotional Man, But Then In The Study Of Solaris Emotion Is A Hindrance To The Explorer. Imagination And Premature Theorizing Are Positive Disadvantages In Approaching A Planet Where-as Has Become Clear-anything Is Possible... The Fact Is That In Spite Of His Cautious Nature The Scrupulous Giese More Than Once Jumped To Premature Conclusions. Even When On Their Guard, Human Beings Inevitably Theorize.

There Are Friends With Whom We Share Neither Interests Nor Any Particular Experiences, Friends With Whom We Never Correspond, Whom We Seldom Meet And Then Only By Chance, But Whose Existence Nonetheless Has For Us A Special If Uncanny Meaning. For Me The Eiffel Tower Is Just Such A Friend, And Not Merely Because It Happens To Be The Symbol Of A City, For Paris Leaves Me Neither Hot Nor Cold. I First Became Aware Of This Attachment Of Mine When Reading In The Paper About Plans For Its Demolition, The Mere Thought Of Which Filled Me With Alarm.

Really, One Of Us Ought To Have The Courage To Call The Experiment Off And Shoulder The Responsibility For The Decision, But The Majority Reckons That That Kind Of Courage Would Be A Sign Of Cowardice, And The First Step In A Retreat. They Think It Would Mean An Undignified Surrender For Mankind As If There Was Any Dignity In Floundering And Drowning In What We Don't Understand And Never Will.

I Have To Admit That He Was Not Bad At Combinatorial Analysis - A Branch, However, That Even Then I Considered To Be Dried Up.

Solaristics, Wrote Muntius, Is A Substitute For Religion In The Space Age. It Is Faith Wrapped In The Cloak Of Science; Contact, The Goal For Which We Are Striving, Is As Vague And Obscure As Communion With The Saints Or The Coming Of The Messiah.

The Horse Respects And Obeys Man Because Its Large Eyes Magnify Everything, So Man Appears Much Larger Than The Horse Itself.

Of The Two Powers, The Two Categories That Take Possession Of Us When We Enter The World (from Where?), Space Is By Far The Less Mysterious. It, Too, Undergoes Transformations. Time, On The Other Hand, Is A Hostile Element, Truly Treacherous, I Would Even Say Against Human Nature.

For What Are Myths If Not The Imposing Of Order On Phenomena That Do Not Possess Order In Themselves? And All Myths, However They Differ From Philosophical Systems And Scientific Theories, Share This With Them, That They Negate The Principle Of Randomness In The World.