Quotes from Stanis?aw Lem

It was to be in essence crueler than revenge: it would have meant the destruction of that which we cannot comprehend.

It might hear us. But what's its name? We have named all the stars and all the planets, even though they might already have had names of their own. What a nerve!

it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city's transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name - street, level, square - and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or - finally - on foot; therefore, four maps

Der Pessimismus der Vernunft verpflichtet zum Optimismus des Willens!

No insults, please! said Pugg. For I am not your usual uncouth pirate, but refined and with a Ph.D., and therefore extremely high-strung.

Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard

Gibarian belonged to what may well have been the last generation of researchers who had the courage to refer back to the glory days of optimism and were not averse to their own kind of faith, which went beyond the boundaries laid

We might add here that later on the constructors had an article published in a prominent scientific journal under the title of "Recursive ?—Metafunctions in the Special Case of a Bogus Polypolice Transmogrification Conversion on an Oscillating Harmonic Field of Glass Bells and Green Gig, Kerosene Lamp on the Left to Divert Attention, Solved by Beastly Incarceration-Concatenation

The most recent of the iamides, heavily advertised - authentium. Creates synthetic recollections of things that never happened. A few grams of dantine, for instance, and a man goes around with a deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy. Why anyone would want that is another matter and quite beyond me.

El ser humano ha emprendido el viaje en busca de otros mundos, otras civilizaciones, sin haber conocido a fondo sus propios encondrijos, sus callejones sin salida, sus pozos, o sus oscuras puertas atrancadas.

It's up to you. But remember that she is a mirror that reflects a part of your mind. If she is beautiful, it's because your memories are. You provide the formula. You can only finish where you started, don't forget that

Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard.

General Apollon Diaz was currently in power and leaned toward the position of the hawks, which was to meet force with force. The proposal had already been made at Parliament (which stood in permanent emergency session) to counterattack: to pull twice the number of teeth from the political prisoners the abductors were demanding and mail them poste restante, as the address of guerrilla headquarters was unknown.

But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment ?k to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but

Purpose informed every scene on Earth, the planet that produced life, because every detail there had its benefit, its teleology. True, it did not always--but billions of years of organic labor had accomplished much: thus flowers possessed color for the purpose of attracting insects, and clouds existed for the purpose of dropping rain on pastures and forests. Every form and thing was explained by some benefit...

I was already thinking there was no way out of the vicious circle of madness—after all, no one can think with anything but his brain, no one can be outside himself to check whether the processes taking place in his body are normal.

It was not that the ocean depths served the creatures there with darkness, to protect them from attack--a darkness they could light, as they needed, with luminescence--but vice versa: the darkness gave rise to those that were pressure-resistant and could illuminate themselves.

they realized it would be impossible to comb the whole infested area in this way and they would have to split up. This was most easily done, obviously, by separating...

And then there were the imaginary dragons, and the a-, anti- and minus- dragons (colloquially termed nots, noughts and oughtn'ts by the experts), the minuses being the most interesting on account of the well-known dracological paradox: when two minuses hypercontiguate (an operation in the algebra of dragons corresponding roughly to simple multiplication), the product is 0.6 dragon, a real nonplusser.

Siempre es más fácil confesar un hecho, que demostrar que no se ha cometido. En este caso particular, la presencia de un cifrado hubiera sido una cosa sencilla; en cambio, su ausencia debía provocar complicaciones [...]. Ocurre que para aclarar todo esto hay que hacer uso de unas explicaciones verdaderas pero muy complicadas

But I would prefer not to dwell any longer on these unpleasant memories; a man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.

Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start.

Nosotros contamos la verdad por cuanto en los cuentos siempre triunfa la verdad.

Im wy?sza w galaktyce cywilizacja, tym wi?cej tam na?miecono.