Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
ALAN LIGHTMANTornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
-
-
It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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 -
If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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 -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
ALAN LIGHTMAN