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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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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
Ultimate
Microscopes
Whose
Skepticism
Existence
Increased
Possible
Sharp
Things
Begins
Magnification
Like
Finally
Inferred
Constantly
Dissolves
Image
Microscope

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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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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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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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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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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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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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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The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
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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
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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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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
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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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I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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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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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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A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
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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No one reads if someone does read, he doesn't understand if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanislaw Lem