Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
ALAN LIGHTMANAs I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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Nature 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.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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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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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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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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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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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN