"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"
— Stanisław Lem

"Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself."
— Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

"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."
— Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

"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."
— Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

"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."
— Stanisław Lem

"We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos."
— Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

"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."
— Stanisław Lem (His Master's Voice)

"...;he was at home whenever he could quench his thirst for knowledge;..."
— Stanisław Lem