Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.
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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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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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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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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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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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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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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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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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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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