As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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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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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.
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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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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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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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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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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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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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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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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
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