Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
ALAN LIGHTMANHuman beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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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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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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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 loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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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 both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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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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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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