Stanisław Lem

"To replay human existence — fine, but to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune, pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?"

"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…"

"Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless void between the stars, how everything about us has become…"

"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'."

"I have to make it clear, however, that I haven't seen the whole film except for 20 minutes of the second part although I know the screenplay very well because Russians have a custom of making an extra…"

"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 …"

"Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child."

"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."