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

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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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A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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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.
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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.
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Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
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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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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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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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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.
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Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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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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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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Plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could one do, if there was nothing one could not?
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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