Alan Lightman Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.33, Vintage
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“In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. 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.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2012). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.13, Hachette UK
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“Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.47, Vintage
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“One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.25, Vintage
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“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 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.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : ""Mr g," by Alan Lightman". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. January 24, 2012.
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“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 need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.5, Vintage
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“Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.”
-- Alan Lightman -
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“All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“I consider myself a spiritual atheist. 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.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : "Reviewing Mr g: Physicist-turned-novelist Alan Lightman meets God at the intersection of science and religion". Interview With Greg Quill, www.thestar.com. February 12, 2012.
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“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.”
-- Alan Lightman -
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“The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“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.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.37, Vintage
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“That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.
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“Everyone shares the same fate.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.38, Vintage
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“If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.”
-- Alan Lightman -
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“With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.”
-- Alan LightmanSource : Alan Lightman (2012). “Mr g: A Novel About the Creation”, p.27, Vintage
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“Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.”
-- Alan Lightman -
“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. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.”
-- Alan Lightman
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