Alan Lightman Quotes

65 quotes in 1225 categories

• Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no…
• Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
• In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a…
• With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive…
• Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
• Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
• There is a place where time stands still ...illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the…
• In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without…
• In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without…
• In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers…
• 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. And if…
• All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
• As a scientist, I don't believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
• Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
• I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science…
• I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical…
• 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…
• 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…
• I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I…
• I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I'd like to…

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