All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
ALAN LIGHTMANNovels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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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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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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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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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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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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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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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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To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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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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I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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