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

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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.
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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 demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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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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I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.
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If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
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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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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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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
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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.
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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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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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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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