Top Stanislaw Lem Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Stanislaw Lem Biography

Stanisław Herman Lem (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] ( listen); 12 or 13 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 41 languages and have sold over 45 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 that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.

Read about Stanislaw Lem in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Stanislaw Lem Quotes

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

Dice, Doe, God, Let, Play, World

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

Business, Capable, Greatness, People, Trust

Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.

Art, Consumer, Creator, Fills, Men, Struggle

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.

Mirrors, Needs, Other Worlds, World, Worlds

A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

Barbarian, Barbarians, Ignorance, Specialist, Wells

I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.

Admit, Analysis, Branch, Branches, Mathematics

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Humorous, Savages, Scheming, Short, Slave, Suicide

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

Behavior, Child, Children, Everything, Explicable, Term

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

Business, Cannibals, Entrepreneurship, Prefer, Recycling, Spines

He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.

Has Beens

It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.

Book, Important, Probably, Use, Write, Writing

A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.

Get Money, Poor, Protect, Rich, Vote

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.

Figure, Given, Machines, Smart, Task, Tasks

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.

Hackneyed, Idea, Love, Men, Order, Torments

How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?

Communicate, Expect, Ocean, Understand

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.

Filthy, Freedom, People, Regained

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.

Art, Explains, Reconcile, World

There are friends with whom we share neither interests nor any particular experiences, friends with whom we never correspond, whom we seldom meet and then only by chance, but whose existence nonetheless has for us a special if uncanny meaning. For me the Eiffel Tower is just such a friend, and not merely because it happens to be the symbol of a city, for Paris leaves me neither hot nor cold. I first became aware of this attachment of mine when reading in the paper about plans for its demolition, the mere thought of which filled me with alarm.

Attachment, Cities, Correspond, Friends, Reading, Tower

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.

Abandoned, Goal, Herman, Kahn, Mean, Technology

Burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure.

Doomed, Fire, Forces, Man, Men, Objectivity

1