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 LIGHTMANEach 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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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.
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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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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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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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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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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
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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 a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
ALAN LIGHTMAN