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I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

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
Nothing
Children
Precious
Never
Killing
Time
Kill
Like
Wife
Child
Read
Someone

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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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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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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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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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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I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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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.
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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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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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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.
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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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What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?' 'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.
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A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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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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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.
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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