Alan Lightman

Everyone shares the same fate.

— Alan Lightman

I should have written books instead of reading them.

— Alan Lightman

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.

— Alan Lightman

The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.

— Alan Lightman

Continents of memory had been lost.

— Alan Lightman

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

— Alan Lightman

A world with one month is a world of equality.

— Alan Lightman

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

— Alan Lightman

It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

— Alan Lightman

Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.

— Alan Lightman

Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.

— Alan Lightman

-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

— Alan Lightman

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

— Alan Lightman

The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

— Alan Lightman

The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?

— Alan Lightman

People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

— Alan Lightman

That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still…

— Alan Lightman

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature,…

— Alan Lightman

I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in…

— Alan Lightman

“The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence,…

— Alan Lightman

Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my…

— Alan Lightman

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They…

— Alan Lightman

A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed…

— Alan Lightman

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading…

— Alan Lightman

I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the…

— Alan Lightman

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal,…

— Alan Lightman

"The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to…

— Alan Lightman

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and…

— Alan Lightman

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of…

— Alan Lightman

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement…

— Alan Lightman

When I used to play golf. It's a terrible miserable game. It's incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots…

— Alan Lightman

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and…

— Alan Lightman

“Arriving home, each man finds a woman and children waiting at the door, introduces himself, helps with the evening meal, reads stories…

— Alan Lightman

“indicate that the same fundamental principles, from which the laws of nature derive, lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different…

— Alan Lightman

In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,…

— Alan Lightman

Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking…

— Alan Lightman

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement…

— Alan Lightman

“A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed…

— Alan Lightman

“Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? [...] Will…

— Alan Lightman

Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present,…

— Alan Lightman