As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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 a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
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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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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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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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“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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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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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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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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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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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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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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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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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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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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