The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
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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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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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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.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
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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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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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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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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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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country… people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
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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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