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That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

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
Good
Record
Drunkards
Like
Records
Feeds
Playing
Coins
Existence
Tune
Wells
Repeat
Human
Tunes
Hackneyed
Humans
Repeats
Jukebox
Well
Keeps
Drunkard

More quotes by 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.
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Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.
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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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There are no answers, only choices.
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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 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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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
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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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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 whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
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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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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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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
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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To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
Stanislaw Lem
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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