Stanisław Lem: Trending quotes

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Stanisław Lem: 148 quotes6 likes

“Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain! I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt 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.<p”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

Love and Tensor Algebra, St. 1, 4, 6, in "The First Sally (A): or, Trurl's Electronic Bard"
The Cyberiad (1967)

“Tarkovsky reminds me of a sergeant from the time of Turgenev — he is very pleasant and extremely prepossessing and at the same time visionary and elusive. One cannot "catch" him anywhere because he is always at a slightly different place already. This is simply the type of person he is. When I understood that I stopped bothering. This director cannot be reshaped anymore, and first of all one cannot convince him of anything as he is going to recast everything in his "own way" no matter what.”

On Solaris screening (1972)

“In an extreme instance, in which there is a Propervirt of less than 0.9%, the TEXT OF THE PRESENT PROSPECTUS may likewise undergo an ABRUPT change. If, while you are reading these sentences, the words begin to jump about, and the letters quiver and blur, please interrupt your reading for ten or twenty seconds to wipe your glasses, adjust your clothing, or the like, and then start reading AGAIN from the beginning, and NOT JUST from the place where your reading was interrupted, since such a TRANSFORMATION indicates that a correction of DEFICIENCIES is now taking place.”

Stanisław Lem book Imaginary Magnitude

Imaginary Magnitude (1984), p. 86

“Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind — as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 11: "The Thinkers", p. 158

“I have to make it clear, however, that I haven't seen the whole film except for 20 minutes of the second part although I know the screenplay very well because Russians have a custom of making an extra copy for the author.”

On Solaris screening (1972)

“A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.”

Podroze miedzygwiezdne, trip 3

“If the methods you employ are good, then what’s the point of all this reasoning and argument? A few drops of credendium, a single squirt in the eyes, and I applaud your every word with enthusiasm, you have my full approval, my esteem. If those methods are good. Yet apparently you yourself are not convinced of their worth, preferring simple, old-fashioned hot air and rhetoric, wasting words on me instead of reaching for the atomizer! Apparently you’re well aware that the triumph of psychem is a sham, and that you will be standing on the field alone, a conqueror with a bad case of heartburn.”

Stanisław Lem book The Futurological Congress

The Futurological Congress (1971)

“"The year is 2098", he said, "with 69 billion inhabitants legally registered and approximately another 26 billion in hiding. The average annual temperature has fallen four degrees. In fifteen or twenty years there will be glaciers here. We have no way of averting or halting their advance - we can only keep them secret."
"I always thought there would be ice in hell," I said. "And so you paint the gates with pretty pictures?"”

Stanisław Lem book The Futurological Congress

The Futurological Congress (1971)

“If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 12: "The Dreams", p. 184

“Fewer are the ways of helping people than of harming them; it is the nature of things, not a consequence of the statistical method. Our world does not stand halfway between heaven and hell; it seems much closer to hell.”

One Human Minute (1986)

“Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.”

Stanisław Lem book His Master's Voice

Source: His Master's Voice (1968), Ch. 11

“It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits.”

Stanisław Lem book Fiasco

Fiasco (1986), Ch. 3, tr. Michael Kandel (1987)

“Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable.”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

In "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius", §10
The Cyberiad (1967)

“For moral reasons I am an atheist — for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.”

From Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, Volume VII, Number 2 (1984) http://www.missourireview.org/index.php?genre=Interviews&title=An+Interview+with+Stanislaw+Lem