Quote

You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.

Stanislaw Lem

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Lead
Hiking
Roads
Climb
Climbs
Climbing
Discover
Mountain
Reach
Summit

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

Image
...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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
Image
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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
Image
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.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
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
Image
Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanislaw Lem
Image
Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible.
Stanislaw Lem