"Insanity, gentlemen, is not a catchall for every human action that involves motives we don’t understand. Insanity has its own structure, its own internal logic." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)
"So-called common sense relies on programmed nonperception, concealment, or ridicule of everything that doesn’t fit into the conventional nineteenth century vision of a world that can be explained down to the last detail." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)
"What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle - what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. [...] Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it’s only soup..." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)
"Are we not, in the end, a clamorous prelude to the final silence, a marriage bed to engender dust, a universe for microbes, microbes that strive to circumnavigate us? We are as unfathomable, as inscrutable as That which brought us into being, and we choke on our own enigma..." (Stanislaw Lem, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", 1961
"How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?" (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)
"Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him." (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)
"The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow." (Stanislaw Lem, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", 1961)
"We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of cosmos. [...] We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors." (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)
"Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men." (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)
"Once there lived a certain engineer-cosmogonist who lit stars to dispel the dark." (Stanislaw Lem, ‘"Uranium Earpieces", 1965),
"Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it." (Stanislaw Lem, "King Globares and the Sages", 1965)
"These dwarfs amass knowledge as others do treasure; for this reason they are called Hoarders of the Absolute. Their wisdom lies in the fact that they collect knowledge but never use it." (Stanislaw Lem, "How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface", 1965)
"For years astrophysicists have been racking their brains over the reason for the great difference in the amounts of cosmic dust in various galaxies. The answer, I think, is quite simple: the higher a civilization is, the more dust and refuse it produces. This is a problem more for janitors than for astrophysicists." (Stanislaw Lem, ‘"Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller", 1966)
"By squandering nuclear energy, polluting asteroids and planets, ravaging the Preserve, and leaving litter everywhere we go, we shall ruin outer space and turn it into one big dump. It is high time we came to our senses and enforced the laws. Convinced that every minute of delay is dangerous, I sound the alarm: Let us save the Universe." (Stanislaw Lem, ‘"Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller", 1966)
"Every intelligent creature was curious - and curiosity prompted it to act when something incomprehensible took place."(Stanislaw Lem, "The Hunt", 1968)
"Is there anything more contemptible than Nature? The scientists, the philosophers have always tried to understand Nature, while the thing to do is to destroy it!" (Stanislaw Lem, "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius", 1971)
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