Background Image
...
Plentitude, When Too Plentitudinous, Was Worst Than Destitution, For Obviously What Could One Do, If There Was Nothing One Could Not?
-Stanislaw Lem
...
Please Wait....
Translating....

Plentitude, When Too Plentitudinous,

Stanislaw Lem
...
Plentitude, When Too Plentitudinous, Was Worst Than Destitution, For Obviously What Could One Do, If There Was Nothing One Could Not?

Understanding the Quote: "plentitude, when too plentitudinous, was worst than destitution, for obviously what could..."

This quote by Stanislaw Lem reflects deeply on the theme of worst. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Worst, Ifs, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Stanislaw Lem interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem is celebrated for insightful thoughts on worst and ifs. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 7
Topic
Worst
Ifs
More From Stanislaw Lem
I Do Not Like The Way People Use The More And More Magnificent Fruits Of Technology To Their Filthy Deeds.
Technology
People
Fruit
Even A Fool Could See That One Didn't Need A War, Nuclear Or Otherwise, To Destroy Oneself; The Rising Cost Of Weaponry Could Do That Quite Nicely.
War
Needs
Nuclear
Every Stink That Fights The Ventilator Thinks It Is Don Quixote.
Writing
Fighting
Thinking
Art Gives Man A Reminder That He Is Not Just A Consumer But A Creator As Well. It Awakens In Him The Urge To Struggle And Perform Great Deeds; It Fills Him With The Craving To Pass On The Promethean Fire To Generations To Come.
Art
Struggle
Men
And Yet We Knew, For A Certainty, That When First Emissaries Of Earth Went Walking Among The Planets, Earth's Other Sons Would Be Dreaming Not About Such Expeditions But About A Piece Of Bread.
Dream
Son
Would Be
So One Must Be Resigned To Being A Clock That Measures The Passage Of Time, Now Out Of Order, Now Repaired, And Whose Mechanism Generates Despair And Love As Soon As Its Maker Sets It Going? Are We To Grow Used To The Idea That Every Man Relives Ancient Torments, Which Are All The More Profound Because They Grow Comic With Repetition? That Human Existence Should Repeat Itself, Well And Good, But That It Should Repeat Itself Like A Hackneyed Tune, Or A Record A Drunkard Keeps Playing As He Feeds Coins Into The Jukebox.
Love
Men
Order
Science Is Turning Into A Monastery For The Order Of Capitulant Friars. Logical Calculus Is Supposed To Supersede Man As Moralist. We Submit To The Blackmail Of The 'superior Knowledge' That Has The Temerity To Assert That Nuclear War Can Be, By Derivation, A Good Thing, Because This Follows From Simple Arithmetic.
War
Men
Simple
Cannibals Prefer Those Who Have No Spines.
Business
Recycling
Entrepreneurship
People Make Filthy Things With The Freedom They Regained.
People
Filthy
It Is Not Good For A Man To Be Too Cognizant Of His Physical And Spiritual Mechanisms. Complete Knowledge Reveals Limits To Human Possibilities, And The Less A Man Is By Nature Limited In His Purposes, The Less He Can Tolerate Limits.
Spiritual
Men
Purpose
Good Books Tell The Truth, Even When They're About Things That Never Have Been And Never Will Be. They're Truthful In A Different Way
Book
Different
Way
I Never Loved Totalitarianism And All The Ideas Of Making Mankind Happy Always Seemed Crazy To Me.
Crazy
Ideas
Mankind
Man Does Not Create Gods, In Spite Of Appearances. The Times, The Age, Impose Them On Him.
Men
Age
Doe
I Don't Resist Progress, But I Have A Growing Feeling That Mankind Uses It Mostly For Disgraceful Purposes.
Feelings
Progress
Purpose
He Who Has Had, Has Been, But He Who Hasn't Been, Has Been Had.
Has Beens
We Didn't Know Each Other Well. I Never Had The Time. Now I See That It Doesn't Make Any Difference. The Ones Who Hurry And The Ones Who Take Their Time All End Up In The Same Place. Just Don't Have Any Regrets. No Regrets.
Regret
Differences
Ends
A Specialist Is A Barbarian Whose Ignorance Is Not Well-rounded.
Ignorance
Barbarians
Wells
You Climb To Reach The Summit, But Once There, Discover That All Roads Lead Down.
Climbing
Hiking
Mountain
The First 90% Of The Job Takes 90% Of The Time. The Remaining 10% Of The Job Requires Another 90% Of The Time. The First Condition Of Immortality Is Death.
Jobs
Firsts
Immortality
Where Do Consequences Lead? Depends On The Escort.
Escorting
Depends
Consequence
Mathematics Never Reveals Man To The Degree, Never Expresses Him In The Way, That Any Other Field Of Human Endeavour Does: The Extent Of The Negation Of Man's Corporeal Self That Mathematics Achieves Cannot Be Compared With Anything. Whoever Is Interested In This Subject I Refer To My Articles. Here I Will Say Only That The World Injected Its Patterns Into Human Language At The Very Inception Of That Language; Mathematics Sleeps In Every Utterance, And Can Only Be Discovered, Never Invented.
Sleep
Men
Self
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.
Children
Killing Someone
Wife
Skepticism Is Like A Microscope Whose Magnification Is Constantly Increased: The Sharp Image That One Begins With Finally Dissolves, Because It Is Not Possible To See Ultimate Things: Their Existence Is Only To Be Inferred.
Microscopes
Existence
Skepticism
Man Has Gone Out To Explore Other Worlds And Other Civilizations Without Having Explored His Own Labyrinth Of Dark Passages And Secret Chambers, And Without Finding What Lies Behind Doorways That He Himself Has Sealed.
Lying
Dark
Men
No One Reads; If Someone Does Read, He Doesn't Understand; If He Understands, He Immediately Forgets.
Doe
Forget
Ifs
The Only Writers Who Have Any Peace Are The Ones Who Don't Write. And There Are Some Like That. They Wallow In A Sea Of Possibilities. To Express A Thought, You First Have To Limit It, And That Means Kill It. Every Word I Speak Robs Me Of A Thousand Others, And Every Line I Write Means Giving Up Another.
Giving Up
Mean
Writing
The Number Of One's Possible Fantasies Is Inversely Proportional To The Amount Of One's Liquid Assets. For Him Who Has Everything Dreams Are No Longer Possible.
Dream
Numbers
Liquid
We Are Like Snails, Each Stuck To His Own Leaf.
Philosophical
Leafs
Stuck
I Hadn't Known There Were So Many Idiots In The World Until I Started Using The Internet.
World
Idiot
Internet
Do Not Trust People. They Are Capable Of Greatness.
Trust
Business
Greatness
Psychoanalytic Doctrine Reveals The Pig In Man, A Pig Saddled With A Conscience; The Disastrous Result Is That The Pig Is Uncomfortable Beneath That Pious Rider, And The Rider Fares No Better In The Situation, Since His Endeavor Is Not Only To Tame The Pig, But Also To Render It Invisible.
Men
Pigs
Doctrine
The Night Stared Me In The Face, Amorphous, Blind, Infinite, Without Frontiers. Not A Single Start Relieved The Darkness Behind The Glass.
Fear
Night
Glasses
Psychoanalysis 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.
Fashion
Lying
Angel
Nothing, My Dear And Clever Colleague, Is Not Your Run-of-the-mill Nothing, The Result Of Idleness And Inactivity, But Dynamic, Aggressive Nothingness, That Is To Say, Perfect, Unique, Ubiquitous, In Other Words Nonexistence, Ultimate And Supreme.
Running
Clever
Unique
A Smart Machine Will First Consider Which Is More Worth Its While: To Perform The Given Task Or, Instead, To Figure Some Way Out Of It.
Smart
Tasks
Machines
I See A Poem As A Multi-coloured Strip Behind Peeling Plaster, In Separate, Shining Fragments.
Shining
Fragments
Peeling
A Man Who For An Entire Week Does Nothing But Hit Himself Over The Head Has Little Reason To Be Proud.
Men
Doe
Proud
To Torture A Man You Have To Know His Pleasures.
Men
Pleasure
Torture
Of The Two Powers, The Two Categories That Take Possession Of Us When We Enter The World (from Where?), Space Is By Far The Less Mysterious. It, Too, Undergoes Transformations. Time, On The Other Hand, Is A Hostile Element, Truly Treacherous, I Would Even Say Against Human Nature.
Hands
Two
Space
A 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.
Running
Mirrors
Should
Giese 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.
Men
Imagination
Facts
You Believe By Doubting And You Doubt By Believing; Yet This State Too Is Not The Final One.
Believe
Doubt
Finals
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.
Mirrors
Other Worlds
Needs
For Moral Reasons I Am An Atheist - For Moral Reasons. I Am Of The Opinion That You Would Recognize A Creator By His Creation, And The World Appears To Me To Be Put Together In Such A Painful Way That I Prefer To Believe That It Was Not Created By Anyone Than To Think That Somebody Created This Intentionally.
Believe
Together
World
The Horse Respects And Obeys Man Because Its Large Eyes Magnify Everything, So Man Appears Much Larger Than The Horse Itself.
Horse
Eye
Men
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.
Humorous
Two
Roots
Come, Every Frustum Longs To Be A Cone, And Every Vector Dreams Of Matrices. Hark To The Gentle Gradient Of The Breeze: It Whispers Of A More Ergodic Zone.
Dream
Humorous
Vectors
Each 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.
Stars
Two
Civilization
Behind Every Glorious Facade There Is Always Hidden Something Ugly.
Ugly
Facade
Glorious
Man Does Not Create Gods, In Spite Of Appearances. The Times, The Age, Impose Them On Him. Man Can Serve His Age Or Rebel Against It, But The Target Of His Cooperation Or Rebellion Comes To Him From Outside.
Men
Age
Rebel
That Human Existence Should Repeat Itself, Well And Good, But That It Should Repeat Itself Like A Hackneyed Tune, Or A Record A Drunkard Keeps Playing As He Feeds Coins Into The Jukebox...
Tunes
Jukebox
Coins
...it Is Easy Not To Believe In Monsters, Considerably More Difficult To Escape Their Dread And Loathsome Clutches.
Believe
Monsters
Easy
There Is Only One Positive Role Of The Nobel Prize--it Creates Some Common Way To Understand A Writer. I Cannot Say, That I Like This Situation, But That's The Way It Goes. The Books Are Being Born And Then Walk Around The World, Just As Children Do.
Children
Book
Around The World
How Do You Expect To Communicate With The Ocean, When You Can’t Even Understand One Another?
Ocean
Communicate
I Have To Admit That He Was Not Bad At Combinatorial Analysis - A Branch, However, That Even Then I Considered To Be Dried Up.
Analysis
Branches
Mathematics
For What Are Myths If Not The Imposing Of Order On Phenomena That Do Not Possess Order In Themselves? And All Myths, However They Differ From Philosophical Systems And Scientific Theories, Share This With Them, That They Negate The Principle Of Randomness In The World.
Philosophical
Order
Principles
The War Of Good And Evil Present In All Religions Does Not Always End, In Every Faith, With The Victory Of Good, But In Every One It Establishes A Clear Order Of Existence. The Sacred As Well As The Profane Rests On That Universal Order.
War
Order
Evil
For Some Time There Was A Widely Held Notion (zealously Fostered By The Daily Press) To The Effect That The 'thinking Ocean' Of Solaris Was A Gigantic Brain, Prodigiously Well-developed And Several Million Years In Advance Of Our Own Civilization, A Sort Of 'cosmic Yogi', A Sage, A Symbol Of Omniscience, Which Had Long Ago Understood The Vanity Of All Action And For This Reason Had Retreated Into An Unbreakable Silence.
Ocean
Thinking
Vanity
Either Something Is Authentic Or It Is Unauthentic, It Is Either False Or True, Make-believe Or Spontaneous Life; Yet Here We Are Faced With A Prevaricated Truth And An Authentic Fake, Hence A Thing That Is At Once The Truth And A Lie.
Lying
Believe
Fake
Everything Is Explicable In The Terms Of The Behavior Of A Small Child.
Children
Behavior
Term
There Are No Answers, Only Choices.
Choices
Answers
Genius Is Not So Much A Light As It Is A Constant Awareness Of The Surrounding Gloom.
Light
Genius
Awareness
Science Explains The World, But Only Art Can Reconcile Us To It.
Art
World
Reconcile
Have It Compose A Poem -- A Poem About A Haircut! But Lofty, Noble, Tragic, Timeless, Full Of Love, Treachery, Retribution, Quiet Heroism In The Face Of Certain Doom! Six Lines, Cleverly Rhymed, And Every Word Beginning With The Letter S!
Faces
Six
Heroism
Really, One Of Us Ought To Have The Courage To Call The Experiment Off And Shoulder The Responsibility For The Decision, But The Majority Reckons That That Kind Of Courage Would Be A Sign Of Cowardice, And The First Step In A Retreat. They Think It Would Mean An Undignified Surrender For Mankind As If There Was Any Dignity In Floundering And Drowning In What We Don't Understand And Never Will.
Mean
Responsibility
Thinking
Seduced, Shaggy Samson Snored. She Scissored Short. Sorely Shorn, Soon Shackled Slave, Samson Sighed, Silently Scheming, Sightlessly Seeking Some Savage, Spectacular Suicide.
Suicide
Humorous
Savages
Faith Is, At One And The Same Time, Absolutely Necessary And Altogether Impossible.
Impossible
There Are Friends With Whom We Share Neither Interests Nor Any Particular Experiences, Friends With Whom We Never Correspond, Whom We Seldom Meet And Then Only By Chance, But Whose Existence Nonetheless Has For Us A Special If Uncanny Meaning. For Me The Eiffel Tower Is Just Such A Friend, And Not Merely Because It Happens To Be The Symbol Of A City, For Paris Leaves Me Neither Hot Nor Cold. I First Became Aware Of This Attachment Of Mine When Reading In The Paper About Plans For Its Demolition, The Mere Thought Of Which Filled Me With Alarm.
Reading
Attachment
Cities
Plentitude, When Too Plentitudinous, Was Worst Than Destitution, For Obviously What Could One Do, If There Was Nothing One Could Not?
Worst
Ifs
Is A Mountain Only A Huge Stone? Is A Planet An Enormous Mountain?
Mountain
Stones
Enormous
Not Far From Here, By A White Sun, Behind A Green Star, Lived The Steelypips, Illustrious, Industrious, And They Hadn't A Care: No Spats In Their Vats, No Rules, No Schools, No Gloom, No Evil Influence Of The Moon, No Trouble From Matter Or Antimatter - For They Had A Machine, A Dream Of A Machine, With Springs And Gears And Perfect In Every Respect. And They Lived With It, And On It, And Under It, And Inside It, For It Was All They Had - First They Saved Up All Their Atoms, Then They Put Them All Together, And If One Didn't Fit, Why They Chipped At It A Bit, And Everything Was Just Fine.
Dream
Stars
Spring
Man'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.
Philosophy
Philosophical
Men
My Pessimism (which, By The Way, Is Far From Absolute) Originated With My Despair In The Lack Of Perfection To Be Found In Human Nature. I Was Attempting In My Successive Books To Show The Inevitable Handicap Of The Human Condition.
Book
Perfection
Despair
We Don't Want To Conquer The Cosmos, We Simply Want To Extend The Boundaries Of Earth To The Frontiers Of The Cosmos.
Cosmos
Earth
Want
The Demand For Absolute Purity Of Genres Is Becoming Nowadays An Anachronism In Literature.
Genre Is
Literature
Demand
I Felt Myself Being Invaded Through And Through, I Crumbled, Disintegrated, And Only Emptiness Remained.
Emptiness
Felt
I'll Grant The Random Access To My Heart, Thoul't 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.
Humorous
Heart
Two
This Is Another Lie. We Are Only Seeking Man. We Have No Need Of Other Worlds. A Single World, Our Own, Suffices Us; But We Can't Accept It For What It Is. We Are Searching For An Ideal Image Of Our Own World: We Go In Quest Of A Planet, A Civilization Superior To Our Own But Developed On The Basis Of A Prototype Of Our Primeval Past.
Lying
Past
Men
I Had No Hope. Yet Expectation Lived On In Me, The Last Thing She Had Left Behind. What Further Consummations, Mockeries, Torments Did I Still Anticipate? I Had No Idea As I Abided In The Unshaken Belief That The Time Of Cruel Wonders Was Not Yet Over.
Ideas
Expectations
Lasts
The Twentieth Century Had Dispensed With The Formal Declaration Of War And Introduced The Fifth Column, Sabotage, Cold War, And War By Proxy, But That Was Only The Begining. Summit Meetings For Disarmament Pursued Mutual Understanding And A Balance Of Power But Were Also Held To Learn The Strengths And Weaknesses Of The Enemy. The World Of The War-or-peace Alternative Became A World In Which War Was Peace And Peace War.
War
Understanding
Enemy
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.
Lying
Age
Stronger
Cripple God, Who Always Desires More Than He's Able To Have, And Doesn't Always Realize This To Begin With. Who Has Built Clocks, But Not The Time That They Measure. Has Built Systems Or Mechanisms That Serve Particular Purposes, But They Too Have Outgrown These Purposes And Betrayed Them. And Has Created An Infinity That, From Being The Measure Of The Power He Was Supposed To Have, Turned Into The Measure Of His Boundless Failure.
Desire
Purpose
Betrayed
The Whole Plan Hinged Upon The Natural Curiosity Of Potatoes.
Curiosity
Potatoes
Natural
Burn With That Consuming Fire Of Objectivity That Forces A Man To Renew Efforts That Are Doomed To Failure.
Men
Fire
Objectivity
Practically All Sf Is Trash.
Trash
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.
Mean
Fate
Men
A Candidate Is A Person Who Gets Money From The Rich And Votes From The Poor To Protect Them From Each Other.
Get Money
Vote
Rich
Come, 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!
Humorous
Fields
Fairy
If Man Had More Of A Sense Of Humor, Things Might Have Turned Out Differently.
Men
Might
Sense Of Humor
If A Man Who Can’t Count Finds A Four Leaf Clover, Is He Lucky?
Philosophy
Men
Gambling
A Dream Will Always Triumph Over Reality, Once It Is Given The Chance.
Dream
Reality
Triumph
It Has No Meaning, What Do You Use To Write, The Only Thing That Is Important Is: What Do You Write. A Machine To Write A Book Instead Of A Writer Is Not Invented Yet, And Probably Will Never Be.
Book
Writing
Important
Solaristics, Wrote Muntius, Is A Substitute For Religion In The Space Age. It Is Faith Wrapped In The Cloak Of Science; Contact, The Goal For Which We Are Striving, Is As Vague And Obscure As Communion With The Saints Or The Coming Of The Messiah.
Space
Goal
Age
Futurologists Have Been Multiplying Like Flies Since The Day Herman Kahn Made Cassandra's Profession "scientific," Yet Somehow Not One Of Them Has Come Out With The Clear Statement That We Have Wholly Abandoned Ourselves To The Mercy Of Technological Progress. The Roles Are Now Reversed: Humanity Becomes, For Technology, A Means, An Instrument For Achieving A Goal Unknown And Unknowable.
Mean
Technology
Goal
I Believe In No Final Solutions.
Believe
Finals
Solutions
Our Ability To Adapt And Therefore To Accept Everything Is One Of Our Greatest Dangers. Creatures That Are Completely Flexible, Changeable, Can Have No Fixed Morality.
Morality
Danger
Accepting
What Gave You This Idea Of An Imperfect God?' 'i Don't Know. It Seems Quite Feasible To Me. That Is The Only God I Could Imagine Believing In, A God Whose Passion Is Not A Redemption, Who Saves Nothing, Fulfills No Purpose--a God Who Simply Is.
Believe
Passion
Ideas
In Riemann, Hilbert Or In Banach Space Let Superscripts And Subscripts Go Their Ways. Our Symptotes No Longer Out Of Phase, We Shall Encounter, Counting, Face To Face.
Humorous
Space
Encounters
Not Only Does God Play Dice With The World He Does Not Let Us See What He Has Rolled.
Play
Doe
World
Trending Author
John Gould
Camilla Lackberg
Remy De Gourmont
Graham Joyce
Ibrahim Babangida
Blanche Lincoln
Category
Information