And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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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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.
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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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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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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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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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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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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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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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