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

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Cannot
Contemplate
Persons
Contemplating
Person
Actions
Thus
Results
Imagine
Future
Paralyzed
Action
Inaction

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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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.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
Alan Lightman
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
Alan Lightman
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 by rain?
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Continents of memory had been lost.
Alan Lightman
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
Alan Lightman
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
Alan Lightman
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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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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.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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.
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