All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
ALAN LIGHTMANWe try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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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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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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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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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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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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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
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And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
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