The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
ALAN LIGHTMANHuman beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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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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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
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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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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?
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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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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
ALAN LIGHTMAN