Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem
Stanisław Herman Lem; 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire, and a trained physician. Lem's books have been translated into forty-one languages and have sold over forty-five million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. He is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 September 1921
CountryPoland
Stanislaw Lem quotes about
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
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!
I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.
Cripple God, who always desires more than he's able to have, and doesn't always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure.
We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
Practically all SF is trash.
I'll grant the random access to my heart, Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove And in our bound partition never part.
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
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.
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.
How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?
There are no answers, only choices,
Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.