The Truth and Other Stories Quotes

“This is evolution’s chance, the result it wasn’t capable of achieving on its own, so it has made use of us, and one day we will set it in motion, sealing our own doom.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“What is an elephant?” an ant was asked, who had never seen one. “It’s a very, very big ant,” it replied .”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Brightening up inside. Thinking more sharply, rapidly, and extensively—all at once. Embracing more, having greater power, carrying the weight of any problem, finding every solution, even the ones that are not there . . . Do you want to hear more?”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Naturally. The question applies in the same way to plants, to animals, and to people—to all living things. Generally we don’t notice it, because we’re accustomed to life, to our life, just as it is. It took aliens, other organisms with different shapes and functions for us to rediscover it—all over again.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Speaking of prophetic: this collection includes a story from 1976, “One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds,” which surely stands as one of the great science fiction stories of prediction ever written, on a par with Verne himself. I will avoid spoilers here, but wow, read it and you’ll see what I mean.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“He survived World War II in Poland under a false identity, as he was Jewish; many in his family were killed in the camps.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Lenin was wrong when he said literature consisted of false solutions to real problems. Literature creates meaning, and meaning is crucial to the human project as such. Although literature creates meaning indirectly, and by symbolic means, so do all the rest of our meaning-generating systems, functioning as they do by way of representations. Literature is the most fine-grained and particular of the meaning-making systems, and is therefore crucial for humanity.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Sturgeon’s law (90 percent of science fiction is crap, but 90 percent of everything is crap).”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Reverend Father, your line of thought has taken a dangerous path! Just another step, and you’ll be telling me offspring can be produced not at the drawing board, by testing prototypes in a laboratory, with the highest concentration of the spirit in the metal, but in a bed, without any templates or training, at random, in the dark, and quite unintentionally . . .”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“According to the principle of indeterminism, the particles behave in a way that is defined only statistically, and within the limits of this indeterminism, they allow themselves to act in ways that are indecent or simply horrifying from the viewpoint of classic physics, because they violate the laws of behavior; but as this is happening within an interval of indefiniteness, they can never be observed in the act of breaking those laws.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“Evolution followed various paths—because it is blind, it’s a blind sculptor who cannot see his own works and is not familiar—how could he be?—with their futures. Speaking metaphorically, it looks as if nature, through its constant experiments, time and again went too far down a dead-end, blind alley—where it simply abandoned the half-baked creatures it had produced, the half-baked results of its experiments, lighting the way for nothing except patience, because they lasted for hundreds of millions of years . . . and set about new ones.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories

“What poets they were, those anatomists, my dear sir, what names they gave to all those parts, the purposes of which they didn’t understand at all: the hippocampus . . . Ammon’s horn . . . the corpora quadrigemina . . . the calcarine fissure . . .”
― Stanisław Lem, The Truth and Other Stories