Man Does Not Create Gods,

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.

Cannibals Prefer Those Who Have No Spines.

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.

Mathematics Never Reveals Man To The Degree, Never Expresses Him In The Way, That Any Other Field Of Human Endeavour Does: The Extent Of The Negation Of Man's Corporeal Self That Mathematics Achieves Cannot Be Compared With Anything. Whoever Is Interested In This Subject I Refer To My Articles. Here I Will Say Only That The World Injected Its Patterns Into Human Language At The Very Inception Of That Language; Mathematics Sleeps In Every Utterance, And Can Only Be Discovered, Never Invented.

Cancel Me Not - For What Then Shall Remain? Abscissas, Some Mantissas, Modules, Modes, A Root Or Two, A Torus And A Node: The Inverse Of My Verse, A Null Domain.