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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?

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
Worst
Nothing
Destitution
Obviously

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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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You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
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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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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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There are no answers, only choices.
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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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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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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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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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.
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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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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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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
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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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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
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Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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