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

More quotes by Stanislaw Lem

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I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.
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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Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.
Stanislaw Lem
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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!
Stanislaw Lem
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Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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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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The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanislaw Lem
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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.
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
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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.
Stanislaw Lem
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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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...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanislaw Lem
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Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.
Stanislaw Lem
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Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
Stanislaw Lem
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We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
Stanislaw Lem