A world with one month is a world of equality.
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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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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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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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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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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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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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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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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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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It 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.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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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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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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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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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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