Lightman Quotes & Sayings

Thus, in this world of brief scenes from the future, few risks are taken. Those who have seen the future do not need to take risks, and those who have not yet seen the future wait for their visions without taking risks. — Alan Lightman

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 and religion. — Alan Lightman

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

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way. — Alan Lightman

I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country ... people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force. — Alan Lightman

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I've mentioned, of course, are original, but it's important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world. And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can't really depend upon what you've done with previous books. — Alan Lightman

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents. — Alan Lightman

But why are we attracted to symmetry? Why do we human beings delight in seeing perfectly round planets through the lens of a telescope and six-sided snowflakes on a cold winter day? The answer must be partly psychological. I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance. — Alan Lightman

Indeed, what sense is there in continuing the present when one has seen the future? — Alan Lightman

The Book of Telling tells of a woman's journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written. — Alan Lightman

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 center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies. — Alan Lightman

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 of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science. — Alan Lightman

In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. 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. — Alan Lightman

Einstein once wrote, The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. — Alan Lightman

Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time. — Alan Lightman

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. — Alan Lightman

What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future? — Alan Lightman

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past. — Alan Lightman

We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers. — Alan Lightman

It never occurred to me that she might travel from one man to the next to avoid being abandoned. Or to avoid being worshiped like a goddess, a worship she both relished and despised. — Alan Lightman

A world with one month is a world of equality. — Alan Lightman

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? [ ... ] Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. [ ... ] But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at that moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity. — Alan Lightman

I don't know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago? — Alan Lightman

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile ... But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived. — Alan Lightman

On occasion a traveler will venture from one city to another. Is he perplexed What took seconds in Berne might take hours in Fribourg or days in Lucerne. In the time for a leaf to fall in one place a flower could bloom in another. In the duration of a thunderclap in one place two people could fall in love in another. In the time that a boy grows into a man a drop of rain might slide down a windowpane yet the traveler is unaware of these discrepancies ... If the pace of human desires stay proportionally the same with the motion of waves on a pond how could the traveler know that something has changed — Alan Lightman

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life. — 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 maintain some kind of artistic control. — Alan Lightman

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. — Alan Lightman

The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning. — Alan Lightman

Oh, love is very much a physical thing ... I realize that it's very complicated, and I'm sure it can't be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it's very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain. — Alan Lightman

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. — 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

Such is the cost immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past. — Alan Lightman

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

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time. — Alan Lightman

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. — Alan Lightman

I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. — Alan Lightman

Suppose that time is not a quantity but a quality, like the luminescence of the night above the trees just when a rising moon has touched the treeline. Time exists, but it cannot be measured. — Alan Lightman

It's very weird to write a song in your apartment and then realize that this random person knows all the words to it. — Toby 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

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

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined. — Alan Lightman

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely. — Alan Lightman

Those of religious faith see time as evidence of god. For surely nothing could be created without a creator. Nothing could be universal and not be divine. All absolutes are part of the One Absolute. — Alan Lightman

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real. — Alan Lightman

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. — 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

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone. — Alan Lightman

On one thing most physicists agree. If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms. Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? — Alan Lightman

unopened. When her son stands in the night outside her house, she goes to bed early. In the morning, she looks at his photograph, writes adoring letters to a long-defunct address. A spinster sees the face of the young man who loved her in the mirror of her bedroom, on the ceiling of the bakery, on the surface of the lake, in the sky. The — Alan Lightman

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong. — Alan Lightman

My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge. — Alan Lightman

Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove. — Alan Lightman

Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have trained ourselves not to be present. We have extended our bodies, created enhanced selves that might be called our "techno-selves." Our techno-selves are both bigger and smaller than our former selves. Bigger in that we have tremendous powers to communicate with the invisible world. Smaller in that we have sacrificed some of our contact and experience with the visible, immediate world. We have marginalized our direct sensory experience. — Alan Lightman

He feels himself falling. He wants to spend every minute with her, he wants to possess her, her purity, her body, her mind. She is what he has been waiting for. Now he can live. — Alan Lightman

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time."
"They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires."
"Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. — Alan Lightman

In a world where time cannot be measured, there are no clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time. — Alan Lightman

One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are ... they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere. — Alan Lightman

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers ... that is a small population. — Alan Lightman

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant ... — Alan Lightman

As science has become more abstract and remote from everyday experience, the role of metaphor in our descriptions of the world has become more central. The language that nature speaks, as Galileo long pointed out, is mathematics. The language that ordinary human beings speak, especially those of us who are not fluent in mathematics, is metaphor. Lightman ends his discussion with another metaphor: "We are blind men, imagining what we don't see." That is a good description of theoretical physics. — Freeman Dyson

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future]. — Alan Lightman

One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and dark and to movement. The rabbi speculated that if emotions are similar to eyesight and other senses, then perhaps emotions were developed by nature as a survival mechanism. — Alan Lightman

When I started singing as a freshman, I didn't sing for anybody - my parents or my friends. By the time I was a senior, the teacher asked me if I wanted to audition for a solo at my graduation. I was really nervous but I got it. — Toby Lightman

I should have written books instead of reading them. — Alan Lightman

Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images. — Alan Lightman

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed. — Alan Lightman

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science. — Alan Lightman

For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves. All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists. — Alan Lightman

Most people have learned how 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 in for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time to be judged on their own. — Alan Lightman

Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over. — Alan Lightman

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, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy. — Alan Lightman

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 of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings. — Alan Lightman

They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives. — Alan Lightman

In a world where time is a sense, like sight or like taste, a sequence of episodes may be quick or may be slow, dim or intense, salty or sweet, causal or without cause, orderly or random, depending on the prior history of the viewer. — Alan Lightman

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer - in the form of a review or something. — Alan Lightman

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful. — Alan Lightman

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. — 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 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. — Alan Lightman

The pilgrims chant with every minute subtracted from their lives. This is their sacrifice. — Alan Lightman

Unconditional love. That's what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn't he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? 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? — Alan Lightman

He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not? — Alan Lightman

I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage. — Alan Lightman

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

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you. — Alan Lightman

You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony. — Alan Lightman

We often do not see what we do not expect to see. — Alan Lightman

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. — Alan Lightman

I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books. — Alan Lightman

I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now. — Alan Lightman

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging. — Alan Lightman

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 Lightman

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction. — Alan Lightman

Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening. — Alan Lightman

I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America. The mother and father osprey stay together. It's a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children. They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter - the mother and father ... — Alan Lightman

Some people believe that there is no distinction between the spiritual and physical universes, no distinction between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between the miraculous and the rational. I need such distinctions to make sense of my spiritual and scientific lives. For me, there is room for both a spiritual universe and a physical universe, just as there is room for both religion and science. Each universe has its own power. Each has its own beauty, and mystery. — Alan Lightman

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay. I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness. Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays. — Alan Lightman

Well-being and need are purely relative concepts. There is no such thing as poverty in itself, suffering in itself, unhappiness in itself. All is relative. — Alan Lightman

In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged. — Alan Lightman

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas. — Alan Lightman