Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
ALAN LIGHTMANTheir predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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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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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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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.
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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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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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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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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
ALAN LIGHTMAN