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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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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Sense
Nature
Even
Literary
Religions
Exists
Works
Imagination

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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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
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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
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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
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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.
Alan Lightman
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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?
Alan Lightman
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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 Lightman
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
Alan Lightman
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
Alan Lightman
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As I understand it, a universe is a ... well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
Alan Lightman
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.
Alan Lightman
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
Alan Lightman
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
Alan Lightman
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Everyone shares the same fate.
Alan Lightman
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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
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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
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
Alan Lightman
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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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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
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
Alan Lightman
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
Alan Lightman