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As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Might
Human
Humans
Someday
Without
Questions
Well
Answer
Need
Beings
Needs
Answers
Never
Wells

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
Alan Lightman
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
Alan Lightman
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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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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
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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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-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
Alan Lightman
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
Alan Lightman
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No one ever expects poetry to sell...
Alan Lightman
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails. So it's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my life...which is so hard to find.
Alan Lightman
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.
Alan Lightman
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we're required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection. I believe that we need to slow down.
Alan Lightman
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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
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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Everyone shares the same fate.
Alan Lightman