We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnd if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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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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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.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
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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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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.
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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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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
ALAN LIGHTMAN