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.
ALAN LIGHTMANA novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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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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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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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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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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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.
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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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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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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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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. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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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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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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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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