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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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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
Purpose
Tolerate
Less
Possibilities
Spiritual
Limited
Nature
Complete
Cognizant
Human
Limits
Mechanisms
Humans
Physical
Reveals
Good
Possibility
Purposes
Men
Knowledge
Mechanism

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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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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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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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
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I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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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!
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There are no answers, only choices.
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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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The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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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.
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Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.
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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.
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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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If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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