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.
Stanisław LemTag: interview science-fiction
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
Stanisław LemMi chiedo se Averroè, Kant, Socrate, Newton, Voltaire avrebbero mai creduto che nel Ventesimo secolo la piaga delle città, l'avvelenatore dei polmoni, l'omicida di massa, l'oggetto di culto sarebbe diventato un carrello di lamiera con le ruote e che le persone avrebbero preferito morire schiantate al suo interno durante gli esodi di massa per i fine settimana, anzichè restarsene tranquillamente a casa.
Stanisław LemPsychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.
Stanisław LemTag: philosophy psychoanalysis critique
The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. 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. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.
Stanisław LemGiese was an unemotional man, but then in the study of Solaris emotion is a hindrance to the explorer. Imagination and premature theorizing are positive disadvantages in approaching a planet where—as has become clear—anything is possible... The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize.
Stanisław LemTag: the-other impartiality
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.
Stanisław LemTag: aliens the-other impartiality
How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?
Stanisław LemCome, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
- Love and Tensor Algebra
One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'.
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