Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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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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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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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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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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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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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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Everyone shares the same fate.
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I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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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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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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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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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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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 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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There is a place where time stands still.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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