It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
ALAN LIGHTMANMy writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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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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Everyone shares the same fate.
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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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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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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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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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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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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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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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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
ALAN LIGHTMAN