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.
ALAN LIGHTMANNature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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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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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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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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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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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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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”
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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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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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To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
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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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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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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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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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I value my correspondence with writers…
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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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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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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