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
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.
A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
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.
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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.
How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?
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.
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
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.