After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
ALAN LIGHTMANYou can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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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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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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Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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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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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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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
ALAN LIGHTMAN