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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.

-Stanislaw Lem

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Psychoanalysis Provides Truth In

Stanislaw Lem

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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.

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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.

Practically All Sf Is Trash.

If Man Had More Of A Sense Of Humor, Things Might Have Turned Out Differently.

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.

Not Only Does God Play Dice With The World He Does Not Let Us See What He Has Rolled.

Where Do Consequences Lead? Depends On The Escort.

I See A Poem As A Multi-coloured Strip Behind Peeling Plaster, In Separate, Shining Fragments.

Genius Is Not So Much A Light As It Is A Constant Awareness Of The Surrounding Gloom.

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.

Seduced, Shaggy Samson Snored. She Scissored Short. Sorely Shorn, Soon Shackled Slave, Samson Sighed, Silently Scheming, Sightlessly Seeking Some Savage, Spectacular Suicide.

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.

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.

There Are No Answers, Only Choices.

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.

A Candidate Is A Person Who Gets Money From The Rich And Votes From The Poor To Protect Them From Each Other.

No One Reads; If Someone Does Read, He Doesn't Understand; If He Understands, He Immediately Forgets.

I Believe In No Final Solutions.

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.

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.

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.

I Don't Resist Progress, But I Have A Growing Feeling That Mankind Uses It Mostly For Disgraceful Purposes.

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.

Everything Is Explicable In The Terms Of The Behavior Of A Small Child.

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.

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.

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.

You Believe By Doubting And You Doubt By Believing; Yet This State Too Is Not The Final One.

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!

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.

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.

Is A Mountain Only A Huge Stone? Is A Planet An Enormous Mountain?

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.

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.

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The Whole Plan Hinged Upon The Natural Curiosity Of Potatoes.

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To Torture A Man You Have To Know His Pleasures.

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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.

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.

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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.

Every Stink That Fights The Ventilator Thinks It Is Don Quixote.

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If A Man Who Can’t Count Finds A Four Leaf Clover, Is He Lucky?

People Make Filthy Things With The Freedom They Regained.

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.

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

I Do Not Like The Way People Use The More And More Magnificent Fruits Of Technology To Their Filthy Deeds.

Burn With That Consuming Fire Of Objectivity That Forces A Man To Renew Efforts That Are Doomed To Failure.

I Have To Admit That He Was Not Bad At Combinatorial Analysis - A Branch, However, That Even Then I Considered To Be Dried Up.

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.

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.

A Man Who For An Entire Week Does Nothing But Hit Himself Over The Head Has Little Reason To Be Proud.

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.

Man Does Not Create Gods, In Spite Of Appearances. The Times, The Age, Impose Them On Him.

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.

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.

He Who Has Had, Has Been, But He Who Hasn't Been, Has Been Had.

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.

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.

The Night Stared Me In The Face, Amorphous, Blind, Infinite, Without Frontiers. Not A Single Start Relieved The Darkness Behind The Glass.

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...

Faith Is, At One And The Same Time, Absolutely Necessary And Altogether Impossible.

Cannibals Prefer Those Who Have No Spines.

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