When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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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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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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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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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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