Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
ALAN LIGHTMANAs 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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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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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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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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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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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
ALAN LIGHTMAN