You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
Interpretation
The journey to achieve a goal often leads to new realizations about the nature of success and life's impermanence.
This quote by Stanislaw Lem suggests that while we strive to reach the pinnacle of our ambitions, once we achieve that height, we may find that what we thought was a final destination is merely a new beginning of downward paths. It highlights the transient nature of success and the ongoing journey of life that follows every goal we achieve, prompting us to reflect on the true nature of achievement and fulfillment.
In practice
In a motivational speech about achieving goals.
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.
We didn't know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn't make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don't have any regrets. No regrets.
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.
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.
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
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.
Tout est poison, rien n'est poison, tout est une question de dose. Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith.
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.
Perhaps itβs that you canβt go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
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