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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.

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
True
Authentic
Truth
Hence
Thing
Faced
Something
Spontaneous
Believe
Fake
Make
False
Life
Either
Lying

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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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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Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
Stanislaw Lem
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
Stanislaw Lem
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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
Stanislaw Lem
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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
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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
Stanislaw Lem
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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
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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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
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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