The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
ALAN LIGHTMANEvery reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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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.
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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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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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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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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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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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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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
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I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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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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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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