Quotes from Stanis?aw Lem

If a man who can't count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

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.

A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place. The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world.

And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.

The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.

There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated.

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind.

From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.

I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.

It was not possible to think except with one's brain, no one could stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his inner processes.

She was beautiful all right, beautiful in a way that was at once seductive, demonic, and raspberry.

I had noticed that I had no difficulty conversing with robots, because absolutely nothing surprised them. They were incapable of surprise. A very sensible quality.

But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn't create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he's born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that's impossible, since a person who isn't brought up among people cannot become a person.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.

It's true that even though I'm a world unto myself, I've just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!

A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only. The Twenty-first Voyage

One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'.

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.