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Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

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
Without
Lies
Doorways
Men
Civilization
Labyrinth
World
Behinds
Chamber
Behind
Passages
Secret
Explore
Chambers
Dark
Worlds
Sealed
Gone
Findings
Explored
Lying
Finding
Civilizations

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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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...
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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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.
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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.
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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
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I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
Stanislaw Lem
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
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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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The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
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A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
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Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
Stanislaw Lem
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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanislaw Lem