I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
ALAN LIGHTMANWe don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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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.
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If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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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.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
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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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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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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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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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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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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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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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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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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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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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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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