Stanisław Lem: Doe

Stanisław Lem was Polish science fiction author. Explore interesting quotes on doe.
Stanisław Lem: 148   quotes 6   likes

“Not only does God play dice with the world—He does not let us see what He has rolled.”

Stanisław Lem book Imaginary Magnitude

Imaginary Magnitude" (1981), "Lecture XLIII", tr. Marc E. Heine (1984)

God , World

“The book does not contain “everything about the human being,” because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain “everything.””

Stanisław Lem

The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.
One Human Minute (1986)

Books , World

“Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 14: "The Old Mimoid", p. 198
Context: Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.

God , Age , Appearance , Time

“No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.”

Stanisław Lem
Understanding , Reading , Forgetting

“Faith as well as science endowed the visible world with properties that eliminated blind, incalculable chance as the author of all events. The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rests on that universal order…”

Stanisław Lem

One Human Minute (1986)

War , World , Faith , Religion

“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.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 8 "The Monsters", p. 120

Men , Fate , History , Sense

“He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?”

Stanisław Lem

"Rien du tout, ou la conséquence" ("Nothing, or the Consequence"), in A Perfect Vacuum (1971), tr. Michael Kandel (1978)

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

Stanisław Lem

Podroze miedzygwiezdne, trip 3

“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.”

Stanisław Lem

One Human Minute (1986)

People , World , Way , Hell

“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)

Death , Way , Travel , Star