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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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Stanislaw Lem
Age: 84 †
Born: 1921
Born: September 12
Died: 2006
Died: March 27
Essayist
Futurist
Philosopher
Physician
Playwright
Poet
Researcher
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Lemberg
Austria
Stanislaw Lem
Lem
Stanislav Lem
Stanislas Lem
Accept
Accepting
Single
Need
Needs
Solaris
World
Suffices
Worlds
Mirrors
More quotes by Stanislaw Lem
Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
Stanislaw Lem
This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.
Stanislaw Lem
That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...
Stanislaw Lem
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
Stanislaw Lem
Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.
Stanislaw Lem
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Stanislaw Lem
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
Stanislaw Lem
It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits.
Stanislaw Lem
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.
Stanislaw Lem
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.
Stanislaw Lem
There are no answers, only choices.
Stanislaw Lem
Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.
Stanislaw Lem
If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
Stanislaw Lem
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Stanislaw Lem
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanislaw Lem
Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
Stanislaw Lem
Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanislaw Lem
A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
Stanislaw Lem
There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize--it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.
Stanislaw Lem