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  • Alan Lightman Quotes   148
  • I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that. It is true that the arts at MIT don't have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Art Quotes , Thinking Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Learning Quotes , Past Quotes
  • Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Character Quotes , Writing Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Knowing Quotes , Law Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Writing Quotes , Our World Quotes
  • When I used to play golf. It's a terrible miserable game. It's incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water...You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes
  • Don't you feel something magical when you're in love?... I do, I certainly do ... but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It's a chemical thing in the brain. It's a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Years Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Atheist Quotes
  • Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Past Quotes , Order Quotes