The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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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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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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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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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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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.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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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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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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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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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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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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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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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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