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.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
-
-
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
ALAN LIGHTMAN