The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
ALAN LIGHTMANEvents, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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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 oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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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.
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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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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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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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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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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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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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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