Solaris

In a certain sense the god of every religion was defective, because he was encumbered with human qualities, only magnified. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, was a hothead who craved servility and was jealous of other gods… the Greek gods had just as many human imperfections, with their quarrelsomeness and their family squabbles—”

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy.

We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past.

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.