Quotes from Alan Lightman

In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

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…

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.

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.

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

No one ever expects poetry to sell...

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.

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

As a scientist, I don't believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

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

But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

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.

A world with one month is a world of equality.

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.

If time and the passage of events are the same, then time moves barely at all. If time and events are not the same, then it is only people who barely move. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

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.

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.

And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.

Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'.

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

For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

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.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first.... 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, each touch has no past or future, each kiss becomes a kiss of immediacy.