How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you canโt even understand one another?
Stanislaw LemA writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.
Stanislaw LemI see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
Stanislaw LemEach civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable.
Stanislaw LemMan's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.
Stanislaw Lem