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
Not only does God play dice with the world He does not let us see what He has rolled.
Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.
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.
Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.
I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.
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!
He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.
I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.