A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It’s the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no...

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes – all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine...

…it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

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.

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.

understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly...

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn’t understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet,...

The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.

I don’t think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

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...

Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . ....

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...

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful....

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.

How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed in space? Do we need to travel everywhere bringing destructive power on our ships, so as to smash anything that runs...

L’homme n’est capable de maîtriser que ce qu’il peut concevoir. D’autre part, il ne peut concevoir que ce qu’il est possible d’exprimer; tout ce qui est inexprimable est également inconcevable. En explorant les étapes successives...

A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. ....

Dopóki nie skorzystałem z Internetu, nie wiedziałem, że na świecie jest tylu idiotów

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.

On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures,...

Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with...

Pel motiu que a Tità res no presentava una finalitat (en cap moment i per a ningú), i pel motiu que no actuava cap guillotina de l’evolució, amputant de cada genotip el que no contribuïa...

Certainly not! I didn’t build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That’s hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like…”Klapaucius thought, and thought some more....

I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their...

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?’Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. ‘What? Who still believes nowadays?”It isn’t that simple. I don’t mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I’m no expert...

Der Pessimismus der Vernunft verpflichtet zum Optimismus des Willens!

One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a “generator of ideas” — for we were running out of them...

Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon’s existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that...

German:Die Buchhandlung erinnerte an ein elektronisches Labor. Bücher waren kleine Kristalle mit gespeichertem Inhalt. Lesen konnte man sie mit Hilfe eines Optons. Der sah einem Buch sogar ähnlich, allerdings mit nur einer einzigen Seite zwischen...

If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?

Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world...

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?

Im wyższa w galaktyce cywilizacja, tym więcej tam naśmiecono.

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,...

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.

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.

A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.The Twenty-first Voyage

Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them....

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,...

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.