Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
ALAN LIGHTMANMost people have learned to live in the moment.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
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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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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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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 certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
ALAN LIGHTMAN