Quotes from Stanis?aw Lem

Pensa che in un razzo l'uomo può scoppiare come un pallone o restare pietrificato, o andare arrosto, e poi rimangono solo gli ossicini, a ballonzolare fra le pareti di latta, sulle orbite del progresso! Noi abbiamo seguito, con gioia, questa stupenda via... e siamo arrivati, e in queste celle, sopra questi piatti, tra immortali lavandini, con una schiera di armadi fedeli, di gabinetti affezionati, qua c'è la nostra realizzazione...

DüÅŸün ki ben bir bak???kçan?n mimarisinin t?pk?üretimini yapabilme yetisindeyim, bileÅŸimini biliyorum, gerekli teknolojim var... bir bak???kça yarat?yorum ve okyanusa b?rak?yorum. Ama bunu niye yapt???m? bilmiyorum, iÅŸlevini bilmiyorum, bak???kçan?n okyanus için ne anlama geldiÄŸini bilmiyorum...

If we won't be able to get rid of our "guests," we'll grow used to them and we'll live with them, and if their Creator changes the rules of the game we'll adapt to the new ones, even if for a while we'll kick against the pricks, raise a storm.

What hasn't been achieved by now will never be; and one has to reconcile oneself to this fact, quietly, fearlessly, and, if possible, without despair.

Why hire a lawyer? I'll make myself one! And Trurl went home, threw six heaping teaspoons of transistors into a big pot, added again as many condensers and resistors, poured electrolyte over it, stirred well and covered tightly with a lid, then went to bed, and in three days the mixture had organized itself into a first-rate lawyer.

A bosszúnál is barbárabb lépés lett volna: elpusztítani valamit, mert nem tudjuk megérteni.

The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all.

Los seres humanos no desean la inmortalidad. Lo que quieren es, sencillamente, no morir. Quieren vivir (…) Quieren sentir la tierra bajo sus pies y ver las nubes por encima de su cabeza, amar a otras personas, estar con ellas y pensar en ellas.

It could simply have taken a procedure that didn't consist of words. As a fixed memory trace it's a protein structure. Like the head of a spermatozoon, or an ovum. After all, in the brain there aren't any words, feelings, the recollection of a person is an image written in the language of nucleic acids on megamolecular asynchronous crystals.

A blurred region, in the heart of vastness, far from earth and heaven, with no ground underfoot, no vault of sky overhead, nothing. I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is clothed in a dead, formless substance - or rather I have no body, I am that alien matter.

We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris , is a lie, useless and not even funny.

aun sin certeza, los problemas imposibles de resolver pueden, sin embargo, resolverse de manera aproximada

An attacking robot follows its program, acting in accordance with focalization and optimization algorithms, differential diagnostics, and game theory—not patriotism. Military mathematics and weapons automation

Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?

El hombre que no cuenta con ningún objetivo en la vida, tiene que creárselo».

La ignorancia de la propia ignorancia acompaña firmemente al conocimiento.

It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

Uno sabe que fue feliz solo cuando ya no lo es. El hombre vive de los cambios.

Lo que fue y pasó, no existe y es como si jamás hubiera existido, al igual que un pastel que te comiste ayer ya no te sirve para nada. Por eso, si uno logra creer en ello, uno podría inventarse un pasado que no tuvo y sería como si lo hubiera vivido de verdad».

We come into this world trusting that things are as we see them, that what our senses witness is happening, but later it turns out, somehow, that children grow up and grownups start to die.

I mean a God whose deficiencies don't arise from the simplemindedness of his human creators, but constitute his most essential, immanent character. This would be a God limited in his omniscience and omnipotence, one who can make mistakes in foreseeing the future of his works, who can find himself horrified by the course of events he has set in motion. This is… a cripple God, who always desires more than he's able to have, and doesn't always realize this to begin with.

Pirx had long ago observed that a man could be judged better by his behavior toward robots than toward his fellow man.

Cada vez hay más científicos y menos sabios.

We're not searching for anything except people. 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.