The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
ALAN LIGHTMANEach person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
ALAN LIGHTMAN