Everyone shares the same fate.
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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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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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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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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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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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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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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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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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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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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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.
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When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
ALAN LIGHTMAN