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.
ALAN LIGHTMANAll of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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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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I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
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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 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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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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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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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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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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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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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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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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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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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
ALAN LIGHTMAN