It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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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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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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All 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.
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I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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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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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN