Alan Lightman Quotes

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?

We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.

We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.

Everyone shares the same fate.

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.

And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.

Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.

Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.