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.
ALAN LIGHTMANMost people have learned to live in the moment.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
-
-
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 -
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
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 -
We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN