Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
ALAN LIGHTMANTime is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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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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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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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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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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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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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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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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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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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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