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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,

Alan Lightman

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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Church Clock Divide Increment March Month Succession Tower
Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ability Exuberance Honor Moment Other Passion Ride Stillness
We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Both Conception External Impose Mind Order Reality
The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Being Belief Disbelief Faith Matter
Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Anything Love Person Possible Pure Want
What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Disturb Everything Faster Happen Less Quiet World
When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Clock Crisp First Interval Invent Make Mechanical Time
We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Bridge Ferry Island Really Service Spiritual Telephone
A world with one month is a world of equality.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Equality Month One Liner World
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Alone Each Get Person Stuck Time
It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Develop Evolution Million Procreation Species Write
Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Different Life Point Reader Singer Something
It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Curiosity Fundamental Intellectual Journey Place Think
Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ago Billion Breathed Century Live Only People Two Year
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Emotion Experience Good Imagination Novel Science Start
And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Human Imagination Machine Match Mind Since Technology Unlikely

In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,

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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,

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