The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
ALAN LIGHTMANDespite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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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.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”
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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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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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